The PM rushed to pay the bills at Scunthorpe to keep the last two UK blast furnaces working when the Chinese owners moved to close them. They said they were losing £700,000 a day. Taxpayers are now paying, but the government so far refuses to publish a plan for loss reduction there or even to tell us how much it is costing. We also know the government’s net zero plan requires the steel industry to close all coal burning blast furnaces and put in electric arc steel recycling plants instead.
The government pledged to keep all the blast furnace jobs, though electric arc works require much less labour. In the middle of this muddle the EU has decided to impose a 25% tariff on UK steel exports despite the tariff free Brexit Agreement and the PM ‘s re set to get friendlier relations.
The EU sells us more steel than we sell them, so the PM could at the very least immediately threaten high steel tariffs in return. He could work urgently with the UK industry to substitute UK steel for imported EU steel. He could take back our fish which he has foolishly offered to give away for 12 years for the re set. He could decline free movement for younger people which the EU wants.
He must do something if he has any sincere wish to save our industry, cut the losses at Scunthorpe and avoid looking even weaker in his relations with an aggressive and unfriendly EU. They often used to damage our industries when we were members. Outside the EU we can retaliate.
October 11, 2025
Good morning Sir John.
I can never understand why we let the EU walk all over us.
The media keeps referring to the EU as our friends, but clearly they’re not.
We could do the retaliation you suggest but, remember that we are reliant on them for a lot of our electricity supply.
The sharp elbowed EU still want to use us to stop other countries from leaving their project. If we are seen to win, others may follow.
At a time of world instability and some politicians determined to go to war, it seems folly to not keep our steel industry going and not just as bloody recyclers of old steel. How will we build our own tanks and ships if we are to get involved in conflict?
We need to stop the net zero madness, extract oil, gas and coal and use it to rebuild our nation.
Let’s get our neclear power stations built, assuming we have the necessary skilled workforce with the right knowledge to do it.
It sickens me to see what the country has become.
What kind of plank puts graffiti all over the inside of one of the most attractive ancient cathedrals in the world,supposedly to try to attract young people to join the dying Anglican faith? It just shows what we have become.
October 11, 2025
Why would 2TK and his sidekick retaliate against the tariffs. The aim is to close yet another industry and this provides the perfect excuse. We supposedly have a rearmament programme which requires vast amounts of primary steel bit net stupid means we have to import it.
The motor industry is being successfully abolished in favour of cheap Chinese vehicles and all the steel works belong to India and China.
Why on earth would this Marxist EU loving government do anything to protect British industry.
October 11, 2025
@IAN WRAGG – exactly, but who was it that banned manufacturing in the UK? Who was it that subsidised foreign industries that are protected in their home markets and pay their taxes in those markets, in preference to supporting the UK?
October 11, 2025
Yes, 2TK is making us ever more dependent on the goodwill of the EU. This winter, I read that we will only be able to keep the lights on IF the EU producers feel they have excess supply to sell to us, at extortionate cost.
To think that 2TK will stand up to the EU on behalf of the UK is fantasy, he thinks we SHOULD be an integrated part of the European socialist experiment. Do you think he sees the problems France is in, will he find ways to give them more of our borrowed money?
October 11, 2025
Sooner the lights go out the better. The British are basically lazy and will not stir themselves until things are actually intolerable.
So cheer up, things are getting worse.
October 11, 2025
Today with high pressure over the uk wind is generating 2.5gw or 8%. Gas and nuclear are generating 51%. We are Importing 17% at £85 per mwh. We truly are being governed by the inmates of the mad house.
October 11, 2025
No, we are being governed by people who have an Agenda which they know is anathema to the British people. They are not stupid; they are delivering UN Agenda 21 / 2030.
October 11, 2025
I agree with Donna ….Its all planned ….we can import steel just like we import energy, its all part of agenda 21, 2030, and agreed by both tory & labour governments
October 11, 2025
@Peter Wood – Peter while I agree with you and 2TK and his destructive team could act in support of the UK . But, you have to ask who was that banned and forced the offshoring of everything that has brought the situation about. 2TK is to lazy, prefers his Foreign glad handing trips to avoid the mess at home, to have even have created this catastrophe. He wasn’t around when energy production was forced out the UK, it wasn’t him or his cronies that handed our energy requirements to foreign state owned entities, or forced the UK to accept the Chinese as the supplier of all this new tech instead of home grown.
October 11, 2025
Only temporary projected graffiti is it not.
It is rather odd that we pass laws to protect invented (without evidence) religious beliefs like climate alarmism or old belief systems and yet no protection for evidence basted rational evidence beliefs. Then we have laws to say we cannot discriminate against people in employment etc. due to them devoutly falling for these odd believe systems.
Surely for efficiency and productivity we do not really want too many employees who fall for these beliefs without evidence or reason? What might they fall for next or waste shareholders money on next?
October 12, 2025
Two Tier, Free Gear, Never Here, Kier standing up for UK anything is unlikely. He has just been to India a country he has done a deal with with no NI for three years for Indian workers so as to undercut UK workers wage levels!
I assume that as the court of appeal said 31 months for Lucy Connolly who withdrew the tweet, it was a first offence, loads of mitigating factors and she pleaded guilty, was not excessive that the man who threatened to kill Farage will get at least 5 years. Unless of course we have Two Tier justice but Kier says we do not. We shall soon find out!
October 11, 2025
Good morning.
He can’t. Not without paying EU fishermen compensation for the remainder of the agreement. For such a deal I wonder what we got in return ? Must be something amazing, although I am at a loss to know what that might be.
Reply The Agreement has not yet been incorporated into law. It must be rejected.
October 11, 2025
Indeed it must be rejected like Chagos, Net Zero, The Workers Rights Bill, VAT on school fees, Ed Miliband, Lammy, Two Tier, Reeves, any more money wasted on HS2, Reeves vast anti-growth tax grabs, any more use of net harm Covid Vaccines, any more low skilled immigration, the war on landlords and employees, the digital ID card, the Islamophobia laws… but thanks to 14 years of serial betrayal the public has to suffer Labour as it was the only way to ditch Sunak’s dire Con-Socialists!
October 11, 2025
+1
October 11, 2025
+1
October 11, 2025
@Reply – if only, please. The French only asked for a maximum of 3years. The French have the Worlds largest EEZ or protected fishing grounds. For instance would they be accommodating if the UK Fishing wanted the same right to fish their territory of the famous ‘Grand Banks’
October 11, 2025
I’m surprised that we haven’t given the french the rights to the Isle of Man ‘kipper’
October 11, 2025
I doubt Ed Miliband wants to keep any steel industry at all – he is the unsackable minister who calls the shots apparently.
October 11, 2025
Miliband, if he actually believes what he says, is clearly totally deluded & insane. He is hugely dangerous to the UK’s defence, economy, jobs, living standards… Or perhaps he does not really believe this drivel and is acting to destroy the UK for some other evil(?) reason!
October 11, 2025
What exactly is behind the EU aggressive decision to impose tariffs on an export sector that is tiny compared to their own trades of the same material with us?
It is incredible to witness the complete contempt the EU seniors have for Starmer. He is so desperate to form a close bond with the EU he has offered everything for nothing and now they are rewarding his submission to their wishes with another beating.
The logic of these actions is hard to see. Why has the EU decided to make an enemy out of a friend and a declared Europhile in Starmer and his team?
If anyone knows the answer please advise.
October 11, 2025
I remember a previous Labour Minister having an epiphany after a visit to his socialist friends in the EU. He had believed they treated Britain badly because we had a Conservative Government – and he had agreed with them and supported their vindictiveness.
He came back from his first meeting stunned and announced that they hated us, even the sainted socialists like himself, because we were British.
Nothing has changed.
October 11, 2025
Rod, they see a week submissive 2TK and will extract maximum advantage. The EU and particularly France is not a friend. They are terrified of Reform getting control of government and want to hamstring us as much as possible before it happens. Reform will have to make some very bold decisions to reverse the damage and we’re in the last chance saloon.
These WEF grufters have to be defeated.
October 11, 2025
Because he’s an easy target who won’t fight back.
Because they’re envious that we have a better agreement with the US than they do.
October 11, 2025
The dreadful Nigel Farage is at it again, flying to Michigan last week where he made a speech slagging off Britain again – this time our education system – to a US Christian college
Claiming that a Marxist union was in control of the education department (completely untrue), Farage dug himself deeper into a hole of his own making, stating that kids are taught that black children are victims and white children their oppressors. For which there is no evidence whatsoever.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union denied being a Marxist and replied that Reform was “far right and racist”, he dismissed Farage as “a poundshop Donald Trump”
Just like his recent claim that migrants are eating swans from the Royal Parks, Farage has no mind of his own, but sycophantically repeats Trump-isms. For those who missed the Royal Park’s response, the charity managing the swans denied that any of their swans have been eaten and stated that none were even missing
Really, you couldn’t make it up. Except this person wants to be our next PM
October 11, 2025
SG. You should get put more. The schools and colleges are indeed being run by Marxist unions and a goid many teachers white privilege.
There is masses of evidence of swans and ornamental fish being killed for food by our recent incomers but of course this doesn’t fit your narrative.
October 11, 2025
There is actually a short film made by the RSPCA, which shows a group of immigrants cooking a swan. Though it is several years old.
Of course when Farage mentioned it, the Far-Left piled on him. Called him a liar and mocked his claim.
As an Angler, I have discovered fish traps set in the river Medway. The Eastern Europeans used to do it. I think they have now been educated.
October 11, 2025
St John’s college Cambridge is ALLOWED to eat the King’s swans
October 11, 2025
Let us not run before we can walk – so let us just hope to have prime minister Starmer recognize there is such a thing as British interests. If that is accomplished ever, he can then be introduced to the steel matter.
October 11, 2025
For an human rights lawyer that would be a bridge too far. Quite how the Tories now claim to want to leave the ECHR after years of denying the same is equally incredible.
October 11, 2025
It’s insanely ironic that at the first hint of a threat from the east we’re suddenly their best friends. They respect our defence capability but never see it as a threat. They know at heart that we have advantages in being an island but only see us being isolationist on the back of it. It’s really time to start playing to our strengths and natural advantages by stopping those boats and making France an easier place for them to remain.
October 11, 2025
The British Establishment doesn’t want to challenge the EU. It wants to be back in it …. if not as a full member then as an Associate Member.
Two-Tier will NEVER stand up for British interests outside the EU. He does not consider Brexit to be in OUR interests and he is doing everything he possibly can to undermine it.
etc ed
October 11, 2025
Starmer has betrayed the essential interests of our country preferring to cosy up to EU’s struggling bunch of third rate leaders. All this back slapping and strutting around Europe has backfired on him spectacularly. Now they’ve screwed him. Whether it’s steel, fish, small boats or travel to Europe EU has shown their true colours yet our Prime Minister has been blind to see through all this, such is his Europhile obsession.
October 11, 2025
The Scottish Government has confirmed that Liberty Steel Dalzell is preparing to restart operations to supply plate steel for naval warship construction, while trade union leaders are calling for significant investment to position the site as a world-leading producer of plate steel for the offshore wind industry.
Dalzell, located in Motherwell, is currently the UK’s only plate mill. British Steel at Scunthorpe is believed to have put in a bid to supply Dalzell with their steel.
Public finance minister Ivan McKee confirmed that the site has secured a contract from Navantia to supply steel plate for naval shipbuilding, with opportunities to bid for further work
Source; ukdefencejournal.org.uk
Reply Let us hope this works.We must make more the steel we need here at home
October 11, 2025
No no.
We must import all steel to avoid using energy and achieve nett zero
October 11, 2025
As the Company’s owner lives in the Punjab, where he is protected from UK Competition we would have to believe that supporting this project with UK Taxpayer funds is just another way of exporting UK wealth for it not to return.
Some countries support and protect the wealth generators the UK prefers to fight them
October 11, 2025
With all due respect Sir JR. You’re asking Starmer to stand up for the UK against the EU. He’s totally in hoc to the EU. He has no backbone. He has no idea. He is an empty shell of political confusion.
I live in hope that Labour get totally trounced in the local elections next May, and that leads to him getting sacked off.
October 11, 2025
Who are you calling our?
Or do you mean EU not UK?
October 11, 2025
If the UK does not want our steel, we can choose not to want many of the things we presently buy from them.
October 11, 2025
@Bloke – I guess you meant the EU. But the UK is desperate for quality steel since its production was banned by the last administration – so we have to grab it from those that actually make it. I guess that is how 2TK will sell it, with him conveniently forgetting he has the power (but not the Will) to reverse these things that the previous crowd set up to destroy the UK
October 12, 2025
I thank you for the correction Ian.
October 11, 2025
It’s no wonder that Labour support is tanking in Wales and Scotland with their important elections due next year.
With the deliberate damage being inflicted on the vital Scottish Oil and Gas industry by Miliband and Starmer, thousands of Scottish jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate, and Miliband’s much trailed new green jobs are just not happening. They are a myth.
The situation in Wales is equally damaging for Labour, where voters, who strongly supported Brexit, -and still do – are seeing Starmer naively cozying up to Brussels, only to have the welsh steel industry under threat from EU tariffs.
Everyone knows that the ONLY way out of the huge economic mess Thieves is creating is to cut spending, but she is doing the opposite : spending is rocketing and she is desperately looking for every possible avenue to increase taxation on everybody to pay for it.
It will not end well………………..
October 11, 2025
He won’t he’s a europhile, Davis is more important to him than Westminster.
Four more years of this, and there’ll be nothing left of what has already become a dishevelled country
October 11, 2025
Do you mean DAVOS ?
October 11, 2025
Starmer’s Gang could but won’t. Starmer and others of his gang are Fabians who believe nation states should be dissolved into an international socialist world order ruled by people like them. Starmer has already said he wants UK to be so aligned with the EU there is no difference. Perhaps he believes that his obseqious approach to the EU will get UK back in by the back door. If in the process he makes UK a basket case he can use that to persuade Leavers that UK has no choice but to accept an EU bail out.
Starmer is devious, practises deceit as a political tactic and he hates all that Britain has stood for historically. After we Chagos, the Falklands or Gibraltar will be next.
Tge main threat to UK is not Putin. It is the unholy alliance of the Woke Left and Islamism which has insinuated its way into every institution of the state and its UK leader is the Starmer-Hermer pair of dark stars.
October 11, 2025
Anyone who believes our PM, who was a senior member of the Fabian Society before he became an MP, is working to benefit the UK is deluded. He’s a Civil Servant, in the same mould as Gus O’Donnell who, when Cabinet Secretary, said in 2011: “When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration … I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare”. I learn from Wikipedia that the Minister for Energy is a member of the Fabian Society, now there’s a surprise…not…
October 11, 2025
“[The PM] must do something.” He will. He will accede to all the EU’s demands and ask for nothing in return.
5 years from now, we shall discover why.
October 11, 2025
557 criminals were illicitly shipped, into the UK yesterday on the 10th October from France…Expect 4 hour delays from today as Europe beings using its new EES border control system – no worries or delays if you’re crossing illegally into the UK
October 11, 2025
+1 but surely Two Tier Kier’s 1000+1 in for every 1 out must now be a serious deterrent surely!
October 11, 2025
The viability of our steel industry has nothing to do with EU membership. It’s demise is caused by Parliament giving the unelected quango, the CCC, backed up by the unelected judiciary, the power to decide our energy and economic policy to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 and thereby save the planet. So the one track policy CCC is doing its job, although they are constantly complaining that we are not on track… There is no-one at the CCC who will say, “Hang-on a minute. We may achieve net zero with these policies but what will be the economic state of the country when we do?” This is a clear example of why cabinet government, where all sides of a policy can be debated, is far preferable to Blair’s idea to hand power to hundreds (444 in charge of 30% of tax-payer spending) of unelected Nomenklatura quangos.
October 11, 2025
Labour could insist that for the growing fleet of free tax payer funded mobility cars they are made from UK steel
October 11, 2025
Much political acrimony here from the usual contributors, but no understanding of the underlying technology …
– Blast furnaces only produce crude pig iron, with a high carbon content.
– Steel plants [ whether electric arc or oxygen driven ] take the iron + scrap and carefully refine it to produce the requisite grade of [ low-carbon ] steel for the final product.
If the even the community here does not know the difference, Lord help us all – the idiotic policymakers in Whitehall must lack the faintest clue as to the very basics of steelmaking.
[ How I grieve for Llanwern, where in happier days we did the lot ].
October 12, 2025
@ a so called Boffin! And, you think you do?
Pig Iron has not accually been made within GB for many years! You Smelt the carbon out of the source, and the more Scrap Steel you add (to the Blast Furnace), the more Carbon is reduced! Using cheap Energy (Coal), Port Talbot has been Smelting, and adding 10%..17% scrap to it’s Steel for many years! The extra cost was the walls of the Furnace use to get broken up, but it does give you a choice of strength and quality of the Steel, that Electric Arc does not, and cannot!
October 11, 2025
Sir John
The other way of looking at it, there is no UK owned Steel Companies, there are just ‘transplants’ of foreign protected industries, that are protected in their home markets and pay tax into those foreign domains. So the EU being concerned about ‘back door’ steel entering their market should be any governments concern for the welfare of their own facilities.
The other factor and its a big one the Conservative Government in their hurry to punish and deindustralise the UK banned the production of the quality steel required for the UK’s defence and infrastructure projects. The fact French steel ends up in UK warships, is because they make the steel we need that we have banned being produced in the UK.
The fact EU steel is used to create the UK rail network is no surprise, we(the UK) are not allowed to produce steel at the right quality.
The Chinese have seen the taxpayer money the Conservative Government threw at India, that was then exported back there – so is it any surprise they felt aggrieved they couldn’t get the same rewards.
October 11, 2025
“the PM could at the very least immediately threaten high steel tariffs in return” That would mean the UK Taxpayer having to pay more to fund its defence requirements, and it railway building. That was a Conservative initiative – they didn’t think it trough. They banned the production of quality (real) steal
The PM and his tribe are just copying how the previous tribe worked. Punish the UK and its people first before asking the why and how
October 11, 2025
never mind Wales and Scotland:England steelmaking plants produced what was needed across the
technical spectrum.English tax contributions made all of it possible.Nuff sed
A Yorkeshireman who remembers and does not forgive
SLI
October 11, 2025
“He could work urgently with the UK industry to substitute UK steel for imported EU steel.” That would mean reversing the stupidity of the last administration. ‘Electric arc furnaces’ do not produce quality steel, they tend to be used for recycling steel that is as ‘cheap as chips’ on the world market.
The sensible question is why is it the EU and all our competitor nations have clung onto making quality steel the steel, the type they need for defence and infrastructure – could it be because it works. Cold it be they will only ban things when a viable sustainable alternative has been found.
To put tariffs on things we need and have banned ourselves from producing, just punishes the UK and its people
October 11, 2025
Kemi Badenoch may have said that she intends to repeal the CC act but it is the intention of half her backbenchers who are members of CEN (Conservative Environment Network) to continue with the Net Zero Mission to net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 as detailed in an article in Conservative Home 02/10 by the Director of CEN. The members of CEN want simply want to get to net zero differently saying “To encourage others to go further and faster, UK climate leadership must not be abandoned, but reinvented in a more credible, conservative fashion and adding “The UK is only a tiny share of global emissions, but we can and should play an outsized role in addressing this challenge through leveraging our strengths in technology and finance.” I suppose the UK tax-payer will be providing the finance and China the technology (infrastructure). Now its fine to vote for parties to market that net zeroing CO2 is necessary to save the planet in order to garner the green vote but they should be honest with the electorate and explain just how expensive this will be and how their lives will change with the necessary rationing of energy, food and transport.
Reply The Leader and Shadow Cabinet make policy. The Shadow Secretary of State has set out a very clear new policy to go for cheap energy which will be popular.
October 11, 2025
Reply to reply : Yes, correct, cheap energy will be very popular. But it cannot be both cheap and decarbonised and consequently a decision will need to be made by each party as to which is more important. As Sir Dieter Helm in a recent podcast advised, we may decide for the sake of the planet to go for decarbonisation but the politicians need to be honest with the voters and inform them that the cost to do so is going to be very expensive.
Reply I agree it cannot be both and I have always backed cheap energy.
October 11, 2025
Sir John,
Para 1 – a poor attempt by Starmer to sweep the problem under the carpet.
Para 2 – Any sane PM would retaliate with ‘OK we will impose 30% tariff on all EU steel imports to UK’.
Para 3 – Does the 25% increase on UK exported steel to EU mean we could now sell to some other country at a more favourable price?
Para 4 – Starmer needs to choose and hit EU exported goods by 25% to UK where it will be felt in several countries. Two can play that game.