British Steel Nationalized to Protect Vital UK Supply Chain

This reminded me of an article in The Economist published last year, April 2025:

"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]

Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:

If British politicians worship voters who are no longer among the living, it is natural that they do the same to a version of the British economy that has long departed. “There are people in this country who love to talk down our manufacturing,” said Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, while speaking in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) factory in Birmingham. During the 1970s, one in four people worked in manufacturing, like Sir Keir’s dad, who died in 2018. Now fewer than one in ten do.

Manufacturing, a small part of the economy, plays a big role in politics everywhere. Britain is no exception. A speech at a JLR plant has become a rite of passage for any leading politician in recent years. Dead Man’s old job comes first for Britain’s politicos. The lives of workers in Britain’s services economy come second. True, manufacturing’s weak performance after the financial crisis is one reason for Britain’s woeful productivity growth. Yet politicians cling on to a primitive vision of it. “He made things with his hands,” said Sir Keir of his father. That modern manufacturing requires oodles of educated workers is ignored. Living graduates play little role in political discourse beyond politicians moaning that there are too many of them. After all, Dead Man did not attend university. Why shou […]

Interesting how they haven't repeated in this article earlier claims that the Chinese purchase of the steelworks was a strategic move to slowly destroy the blast furnaces by letting them cool under pretext of low demand.

The government is forced to sell steel at a loss, because all the buyers for whom this is a such a vital supply would otherwise buy cheaper imported steel, every single one of them.

And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.

What, again?

(British Steel's predecessor was itself a nationalisation effort in the 60s.)

The government is the only entity which can gain money from running a business at a loss. For example: running trains at a loss will reduce car traffic, thus reducing losses from traffic jams and reducing road maintenance costs. With steel the government can recoup losses from producing cheap steel through steel-dependent services like roadworks, the military, public housing,...

The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), which would have provided orders for virgin steel from such furnaces. It's hard to see how this has a happy and sustainable ending.

I immediately thought of the Judas Priest album and agreed that supplying heavy metal to the UK is indeed vital.

I assume, ultimately western nations will have to adopt what already exists for agricultural goods for production as well. I am afraid it will end as a per-worker subsidy analog to per-area-of-land for lack of a better metric but in the end, that is what will be necessary if one wants to keep any industrial capabilities.

Meanwhile Australia's last remaining manganese plant shut down last night...