One of my most enjoyable evenings on GB News was spent in Scunthorpe where we had taken Jacob Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation show.
I was unsure how I might be received by the audience of steelworkers and their families given my passionate advocacy of net zero.
Scunthorpe’s two blast furnaces, Anne and Bess, belch out 11 million tons of CO2 annually, three per cent of total UK emissions, and some of the people I was facing would most likely lose their jobs when greener alternatives are introduced.
But the audience could not have been more lovely and welcoming, and many stayed behind to chat and joke after the show. The steelworkers of Scunthorpe have a special place in my heart.
Their plant has been under threat longer than most of them can remember, yet they keep turning up for work full of enthusiasm and good humour. Without British Steel the Scunthorpe community would disintegrate.
Which is why Keir Starmer was right to recall Parliament in emergency session on Saturday to pave the way for nationalisation. Had he not done so the furnaces would have shut down never to reopen.
Britain's backbone for sale? China isn't just coming for our steel - Nigel Nelson
GB News/Getty Images
That would have left Britain the only country in the G7 unable to make steel from scratch - and we’re going to need the stuff Scunthorpe churns out if railway lines are to be built, the Navy is to get more ships and Heathrow is to be expanded.
It is not just the 2,700 jobs at the steelworks at risk, but the 37,000 others they support, and if Chancellor Rachel Reeves wants economic growth she’ll need to keep Scunthorpe alive.
The Government is keeping under its hat just how much this rescue will cost, but the furnaces have at best five years life left and replacing them, whether with environmentally-friendly electric arc or hydrogen ones, will cost at least £2.5billion.Ministers are now desperately trying to secure enough supplies of coking coal and iron ore to feed the furnaces and to search for a private investor - though the chances of finding one are about as likely as seeing pig iron fly. The market value of the plant is effectively nil.
The Tories had hoped to open a coal mine in Whitehaven, Cumbria, the first of its kind in Britain for 30 years, but planning permission was overturned by the High Court last year on environmental grounds and no one seems keen to appeal. Which means Scunthorpe’s fuel will have to come from abroad.
But the antics of Scunthorpe’s Chinese owners, Jingye, have called into question just how much Britain can rely on foreigners to act in our country’s best interests.
I’ll lay my political cards on the table here. I believe it would be better if essential infrastructure and public utilities and services were in public control so we know that Britain is running them.
It was, after all, what Keir Starmer promised when he was running for the Labour leadership.
If Rachel Reeves wants growth she must keep Scunthorpe alive by saving British Steel.
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Then reality kicked in. Nationalising the energy companies alone would have cost £90billion just to pay back shareholders the money they invested, and double that if they were given the market value of their holdings. That’s more than the NHS gets.
But after the alleged behaviour of Jingye we ought to think twice before handing over more of our nation’s assets to China. And perhaps even do a bit more due diligence when France and Germany also try to muscle in.
And there should be some tweaks to that effect in the Government's industrial strategy to be unveiled in June.
If it is true that Jingye planned to close Scunthorpe to force Britain to buy more virgin steel from China then it calls into question the other pies the Chinese have their fingers in - such as the National Grid, Thames Water and their 10 per cent stake in Heathrow.
We’ve already decided they can’t be trusted with the nuclear power station Sizewell C and the 5G network, and just why is China giving quite so much money to our universities with Oxford snaffling £24million and Cambridge up to £19million?
The Chinese hope to build a stonking great five acre embassy near the Tower of London, a plan blocked by the last government and now being reconsidered by this one.
China is a big country but does it really need such a large diplomatic post in such a small one? What is the purpose of two suites of basement rooms and a tunnel redacted from the planning application?
That certainly sounds sinister to shadow Housing Secretary Kevin Hollinrake. He said: “It would be a barbarous irony that a site so close to the medieval Tower of London could become a modern-day dungeon under a Starmer government.
”This is not to suggest treating China as a hostile state like Russia and Iran. Well, at least not yet anyway. But it wouldn’t hurt for ministers to take a step back before bowing to Beijing’s demands."
Scunthorpe almost came a cropper because of a Chinese company. We wouldn’t want other vital bits of Britain’s anatomy to go the same way.
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