The North East of England was once the greatest steel production centre in the world, driving the industrial revolution, with steel from Teesside building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Wembley Stadium and many other iconic structures. Britain once produced 40% of the world’s steel and we are now in 26th place.
The recall of Parliament earlier this month to debate nationalising the Chinese owned, and now ironically named, British Steel only served to highlight the short sightedness over many decades of allowing our strategically important steel-making industry to drift into terminal decline. Previous occasions Parliament has sat on a Saturday include to debate going to war in the Falklands and more recently, the situation in Afghanistan.
We broadly support what the Labour Government have done to nationalise British Steel and we wouldn’t have expected Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, whose hometown of Sunderland relied so heavily on local steel for its shipbuilding industry, to have done anything else. We should never have allowed the Chinese to own our only virgin steel producing site.
The Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill contains important clauses to ‘preserve capability’ in the steel industry. How we got to this point can be debated another day but, in the meantime, True North believe that the Government’s Industrial Strategy should identify opportunities to re-industrialise the True North by investing in building capacity in strategically essential sectors.
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, China’s globalist, inexorable Belt & Road initiative and the trade tariffs of the Trump administration should all serve to accentuate the urgent need to build strategic resilience in key sectors such as steel, energy and food production.
If Government are serious about economic growth, closing the gap between the regions and becoming self-sufficient once again in strategically important sectors then we must be bold. The True North needs industrial jobs and would be galvanised by having a renewed economic purpose in the national interest.
The levers are now in place to stoke the dying embers of our steel industry in Scunthorpe and this needs to be followed by an ambitious plan to invest in wider steel production. At the same time, every effort must be made to bring down the cost of industrial energy so we can compete globally. Without a pragmatic re-appraisal of the rush to net -zero the steel industry will be lost forever, and all of those MPs will have made a wasted trip back to Westminster on a Spring Saturday in April.
