4 April 2025
Unite members on TUC GCHQ march 27 January 2024, Cheltenham and they are still fighting for their industry. Photo Workers.
British Steel, owned by the Chinese Jingye group, announced the closure of its two steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe at the end of March. They were the last remaining furnaces in Britain. This is a disastrous development for British industry and all workers given the fundamental importance of steel.
Between 2,000 and 2,700 jobs will go as 160 years of steelmaking in the town are ended. British Steel is offering a consultation on three options: closure of the blast furnaces and steelmaking by early June 2025, closure in September 2025 or closure at a future point beyond September 2025.
Dependent
The industry body UK Steel described the proposal as “heartbreaking”. It pointed out that this leaves the country dependent on international supplies of steel vital to transport, infrastructure and construction. Scunthorpe produces, for example, 95 per cent of the steel used by Network Rail.
Earlier in March the three unions organising steelworkers, Community, GMB and Unite, issued a report, Steel Reforged, demanding among other things that energy, defence and related infrastructure should be required to use British-made steel and support for the industry on electricity prices.
Mockery
The closure of our last blast furnaces makes a mockery of any pretence of growth by the Labour government, but that should not have been a surprise. The present Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, gave a lecture in March 2024 setting out the policy her party would follow in power. She said, “A modern industrial policy must be strategic, and it must be selective.”
But Reeves prefaced those fine words by castigating the Conservative government for downgrading the emphasis on climate change in economic planning, promising to reverse that. Her government has done so, with catastrophic results for many aspects of the economy, not just steel making.
Decline
On 1 April S&P Global published its latest Purchasing Managers’ Index for UK manufacturing, showing further contraction as new orders declined at their fastest rate for 19 months, and the index, based on questionnaires to 650 companies, showed manufacturing production decline for the fifth month in succession.