My Take | Don’t blame China’s Jingye for failing to save UK steel industry
There was no communist plot behind British Steel’s collapse. If anything, the government takeover may amount to nationalising Chinese property
In the topsy-turvy world of British politicking and news reporting, the collapse of British Steel, followed by a government takeover, is the result of either Chinese bad faith, sabotage or worse, a communist plot.
It is, of course, none of the above.
But we live in a world turned upside down. So we now have the government of the United Kingdom – the land that gave birth to laissez faire capitalism – effectively nationalising British Steel, which has been owned by China’s Jingye Steel since 2020.
The current Labour government and the Tory opposition are blaming it all on the Chinese, as well as on each other. It was the Conservative government of Boris Johnson who approved the Jingye sale when British Steel was on the brink of insolvency.
Jingye, in fact, gave it a new lease on life and saved more than 3,000 jobs. But the operations of blast furnaces in the end proved too costly – especially with high energy and labour costs in the UK – and terrible for the environment. They are among the most carbon-emitting of all industrial processes.
The Labour government had been negotiating with Jingye to save its plant in Scunthorpe, Yorkshire, with a rescue package similar to the one with the last Tory government for India’s Tata Steel, which owns and operates the steelworks at Port Talbot, in south Wales.