The saga of the last steel mill in the home of the Industrial Revolution gets more compelling. And we don’t mean it in a good way. As we mentioned briefly three weeks ago, “the Chinese owners of the last British steel mills ‘rejected an offer of £500m from the Government to help it switch to green energy.’ Half a billion pounds tossed blithely into the furnace and it still wasn’t enough.” And it would be harder to look stupid than the government and the political Establishment do for having blundered into this embarrassment and not seen it coming. Even the Guardian notes that “Senior Labour figures have urged the government to review Chinese investment in UK infrastructure in the wake of the British Steel crisis, warning that a rapprochement with Beijing could risk national security.” But the communist owners of the Scunthorpe steel mill didn’t close it just to undermine Britain’s capacity to build armaments in an increasingly dangerous world. They also wrote off their massive capital investment partly because they couldn’t make money making steel, and were in fact losing some “£700,000 a day” in Britain’s green-brown economy where soaring energy costs are causing grisly economic decline. Which the elites also didn’t see coming. How do you say “D’oh” in the King’s English again?

It really is an amazing spectacle, combining smugness, ineptitude and a disregard for the obvious basic interests of their own nation, society and civilization that borders on disloyal. As the Times noted:

“‘It is an explicit strategy of the Chinese Communist Party to undermine the industrial base of foreign countries,’ said Luke de Pulford, executive ­director of the Inter-Parliamentary ­Alliance on China, an international group of politicians that scrutinises Beijing’s approach to human rights and international rules. ‘Yet we keep handing Beijing the tools of our own demise. British Steel must be the canary in the coalmine for all Chinese investment in UK critical infrastructure. We should not be handing an adversary state which means us harm access to the services the country needs to run.’”

Imagine having to be told such a thing.

Writing in the Times, Alistair Osborne suggested that the Chinese owners might indeed be sabotaging the plant by a risky “salamander manoeuvre” to shut down one of Scunthorpe’s two blast furnaces so as to have enough supplies to run the other, and might be doing it to “put Britain out of primary steelmaking for good, so upping reliance on cheap Chinese imports.” But, he cautioned:

“Cue panic in Westminster, a weekend recall of parliament, new powers to keep the furnaces afire and the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds scrambling around for stocks of iron ore and coking coal: the stuff that Jingye looks to have deliberately run down. And, yes, he has preserved 2,700 jobs for now and prevented Britain becoming the only G7 nation without virgin steelmaking, arguably crucial in an uncertain world, if only for the defence industry, even if we’d still have to import the raw materials. Amid the drama let’s not miss the key point: the government hasn’t so much rescued a business as taken on a financial black hole.”

These guys need help. Or they need to go away. Another Guardian story starts:

“British Steel is to deploy emergency measures in a race against time to save the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe, as the business secretary refused to guarantee the plant could get what it needed in time. The company is understood to be looking at offers of help from more than a dozen businesses to obtain materials such as iron ore and coking coal, potentially allowing it to avoid the temporary shutdown of one of the two furnaces. On Saturday, parliament passed a one-day bill containing emergency powers to gain control of the Scunthorpe site after its Chinese owner, Jingye, declined government support to keep the plant running over the next few weeks. British Steel’s UK management team is scrambling to buy the materials, with help from government officials. The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, has declined to directly accuse Jingye of sabotaging the plant but it is understood ministers do not expect the company to return to any negotiations.”

So they may be unable to keep it open even after nationalizing it to keep it open after driving it out of business. Great. What’s next?

Aaaargh. This:

“Reynolds said there would not be a full ban on Chinese investment in UK industry, with MPs raising questions about whether companies would be allowed to invest in a planned new nuclear site. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been on a charm offensive with Beijing to try to attract investment.”

Those lovely evil Chinese capitalist communists. And those lovely Labour Party economists:

“Reynolds said the costs to the UK economy of closing the plant and losing the country’s steelmaking capacity – plus the significant job losses it entailed – would have been at least £1bn, more than the losses expected from nationalising the plant.”

And when, pray tell, is the last time a British government busy nationalizing something made a reliable estimate of the losses that would ensue? Though Reynolds did find one way not to make unreliable estimates:

“Reynolds told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg he would not ‘make [his] situation or the nation’s situation more difficult’ by giving further details on whether the steel blast furnaces would be able to continue operating.”

Outstanding. Blunder into a comical crisis then refuse to inform the public. What’s next?

Well, how about:

“While some materials at Immingham port on the Humber estuary in Lincolnshire are awaiting payment, British Steel is trying to find materials for the coming weeks, with some shipments taking up to 45 days to arrive.”

One Guardian writer’s take on the episode is worth reading and studying, not because it’s right but because it’s so wrong as to be illuminating. According to columnist Owen Jones:

“British Steel is heading for nationalisation – against the will of the government. This is an important point, because it speaks to dogma colliding with practical reality. Here is a private company defeated by the ‘sink or swim’ laws of the free market ideology that produced it, demanding instead that taxpayers come to its rescue – by threatening to make shortsighted business decisions with damaging consequences for the country’s future.”

Any time someone speaks of dogma or ideology colliding with reality or facts you know they are naïve to the point of cluelessness about epistemology. Ideologies are just consistent world-views. Some are much better than others of course and we advise you to choose yours carefully. But without such a thing coherent thought is impossible. Indeed the meme “I am principled, you are pigheaded, she’s an ideologue” gets us nowhere… except the schoolyard, where we exchange taunts of “I know you are but what am I?”

As here, in fact, because for someone to speak of the debacle of British deindustrialization as the product of the free market would be a prime example of ideology overriding facts if indeed thought worked that way. Especially as Jones continues immediately:

“What happened in Scunthorpe is not an outlier in the failed experiment of privatisation, and the government’s emergency takeover tells us that public ownership is a realistic solution if there is a political will.”

Um maybe wait and see how it goes before calling it “realistic” because Britain’s nationalization binge after 1945 took it from world-beating economic and military power to basket case in three decades. If new new new Labour are reluctant nationalizers, it might be that they have slightly longer memories than some kid (admittedly now pushing 40) whose parents met in a Trotskyite group within old old grim Labour and who was an activist before becoming a journalist and repeatedly accuses Israel of genocide. And please try to remember that if the state is making the rules, it doesn’t matter whose name is on the share certificate.

Indeed, as another Times story pointedly observed:

“Ministers are facing warnings about the extent of China’s involvement in Britain’s critical infrastructure amid a race to keep furnaces at British Steel’s Scunthorpe site going. The government’s decision to step in to protect the company has shone a spotlight on other areas of critical infrastructure in which Chinese firms have a stake. Not all companies in China will support President Xi’s regime, but all private companies in the country have a legal duty to follow the state’s instructions when required.”

Likewise, British firms may be privately owned. But they must take government energy policy as they find it, including carbon taxes, cap and trade and so forth, along with labour regulations, tax rates and loopholes and everything else. If firms go under because of bad government policy, blaming the “free market” is as absurd as blaming “ideology”.

As to the actual bigger picture, the problem here is that the British government, like those in most of the Western world emphatically including Germany, has been making “ideological” decisions about a headlong plunge to Net Zero no matter the misery and poverty involved because otherwise we will set the sky on fire. And no matter that it doesn’t matter what Western nations do if non-Western nations keep building hydrocarbon power plants including coal plants at a pace that drowns out anything we might achieve in emissions reductions.

Would you trust such people to run a factory?