How Westminster Killed British Steel

China got the blame. But this was policy suicide.

The dramatic intervention to save Britain’s last virgin steelworks was Shakespearean in its blend of tragedy and farce.

In case you missed it, Parliament was recalled during Easter recess — a rare and serious act — to stop the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe from going cold. Ministers even reportedly discussed using the Royal Navy to escort a shipment of coking coal to keep the fires burning.

Scunthorpe, a steel town in North Lincolnshire, has been a cornerstone of British industry for well over a century. Its blast furnaces have forged the raw material for everything from warships to railway lines. The town itself grew up around the mills and furnaces, and in many ways, it lives or dies with them. Now, it has been thrown a lifeline by the same political class that spent years passing the laws that killed it.

The Chinese owners of British Steel — the Jingye Group — have become the lightning rod for public anger. They closed the coke ovens, sourced poor-quality fuel, and threatened to shut the furnaces down entirely. Their mismanagement and cost-cutting sparked political fury. Jingye may be a bad actor but it just walked in on the final act of a much longer tragedy.

The real villains are those now casting themselves as heroes. This is a Parliament that has spent more than fifteen years on a bipartisan crusade to eliminate coal and build an energy policy powered more by propaganda than physics. A crusade that has driven up industrial energy prices, pushed manufacturers offshore, and made domestic steelmaking a commercially suicidal endeavour.

Let’s chronicle the last rites of a national industry — step by painful step, as reported by the British press.

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The Crisis Breaks: Jingye pulls the plug

The trigger came in April 2025, when the Jingye Group, Chinese owners of British Steel, abruptly halted orders of coking coal and iron ore — a move that would shut the blast furnaces. Without raw materials, the furnace linings would harden and crack. Restarting them would be impossible.

"The blast furnace lining becomes part of that reaction. Deprive the furnace of its raw materials and it is destroyed. Without iron, you cannot make steel." — Sir Andrew Cook, Financial Times, April 2025. (link)

There were even suspicions this was deliberate. As the Financial Times reported, the government initially feared Jingye had "tried to sabotage its own loss-making plant" by feeding it substandard coke.

"There was concern in Whitehall that the closure of the Queen Anne furnace could have been intentional, an effort to manufacture a case for winding down operations." — Financial Times, April 2025. (link)

"British Steel has made a string of operational errors since Jingye’s takeover... but the timing of this shutdown prompted fears in government of a more calculated withdrawal." — Financial Times, April 2025.

"Engineers mistakenly sourced coke that was a mix of both ‘low-quality and low-condition’... Ministers were reassured the shutdown was due to ‘incompetence and cost-cutting’ rather than malign intention." — Financial Times, April 2025. (link)

The furnaces were losing £700,000 a day. The Chinese were ready to cut their losses. The UK government — after handing out over £100 million in prior subsidies — refused to keep writing cheques.

Even the Liberal Democrats weighed in. Their foreign affairs spokesman, Calum Miller MP — whose party has long championed aggressive climate targets, net zero mandates, and the phase-out of coal — warned that Britain should never again return control of such strategic assets to Chinese interests:

"Domestic steel production is absolutely vital to our national security... The government should rule out any Chinese firms’ future involvement in the ownership of British Steel." — ITV News, April 2025. (link)

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Parliament Recalled: Emergency Measures

Facing imminent collapse, Prime Minister Keir Starmer recalled Parliament during the Easter break. The government rushed through the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act 2025, allowing it to seize operational control.

"While Jingye still owns the Scunthorpe works... nationalization is a likely option in the short term." — Dave Pares, spokesman for PM Starmer, AP News, April 2025. (link)

"The government has taken over daily running of British Steel and ordered emergency shipments of coal and ore from Australia and the US." — ITV News, April 2025. (link)

In a profoundly ironic gesture, the Royal Navy was reportedly placed on standby to guarantee delivery of a load of coal. Here was the iconic British navy — once the symbol of imperial power and industrial might — deployed to import the very fuel Westminster has spent decades outlawing at home. Britannia once ruled the waves; now she waives the rules. Consider the logic of what we are witnessing. Britain will use coal, it needs coal — it just won’t use its own.

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China Responds: Diplomatic Fallout

The move provoked an angry response from Beijing. The Chinese embassy lashed out in a statement described by The Guardian as unusually combative:

"The anti-China rhetoric of some British politicians is extremely absurd, reflecting their arrogance, ignorance and twisted mindset." — The Guardian, April 2025. (link)

This wasn’t just an economic breakdown — it was becoming a diplomatic crisis. And beneath the shouting match, a more uncomfortable truth: Western governments spent decades outsourcing their industrial capacity to China. Now they feign surprise when Beijing plays power politics with the very assets they handed over. Unlike Westminster, Beijing isn’t powered by fantasy — China now burns 58 per cent of the world’s coal. A reminder that while Western nations dismantle their industrial base for climate virtue, Beijing powers ahead with thermal realism.

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How Energy Policy Killed British Industry

The best diagnosis of this industrial collapse came from The Times columnist Jim Armitage. In a blistering column, he drew the straightest possible line from Britain's energy policy to its industrial decay:

"Make no mistake, the crises ripping through Britain’s industrial behemoths — the deaths of Port Talbot and Redcar’s steelworks, the closure of Grangemouth’s oil refinery, the struggles of Staffordshire’s ceramics plants — all trace back to that one factor: the high price of British electricity." — The Times, April 2025. (link)

And the reason for those high prices? Successive UK governments — Tory and Labour — eliminated coal-fired power in pursuit of net-zero goals without offering affordable alternatives.

"By killing off cheap, coal-fired electricity generation, successive governments focused on meeting net-zero emissions targets have crippled energy-intensive manufacturers... UK electricity is 50 per cent more expensive than in Germany and France, and four times as costly as in the US." — Armitage, The Times.

This wasn’t market failure. It was deliberate. A generation of leaders made climate orthodoxy their guiding light. The economic consequences were ignored, or papered over with press releases, until the crisis hit. Now the blast furnaces are dying, and with them, thousands of skilled jobs and any claim Britain has to industrial sovereignty. Sound familiar?

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Ashes of Empire

British Steel wasn’t sabotaged by China. It was dismantled by its own government, undone by a generation of politicians who preached sovereignty but outsourced it, who championed green dreams that gutted their industry. The Chinese owners may have wielded the knife — but it was forged, sharpened, and handed to them by Westminster.

This wasn’t market failure. It was state-sponsored suicide. Parliament vilified coal, embraced expensive and unreliable energy, and then feigned surprise when the blast furnaces began to fail.

There is no resilience without cheap, abundant energy. No sovereignty without steel. And no excuse left.

The question that lingers is whether those responsible even understand what they’ve done. Do the architects of this catastrophe realise they are complicit? That the laws they pass, the fuels they demonise, and the costs they impose have consequences? Or will they retreat behind another press release, another net zero pledge, as the last embers of Britain’s industrial fire fade to ash?

Key sources and links:

• The Times editorial: Labour must cut industrial energy costs

• AP News: UK government takes over British Steel

• The Guardian: China accuses UK politicians of 'arrogance'

• Financial Times: British Steel crisis coverage, Sir Andrew Cook letter

• ITV News: Raw materials for Scunthorpe

• The Independent: Warnings on China’s strategic intentions

• The Times (Armitage): The end of coal shattered the steel industry

• The Times: Scunthorpe and hydrogen dreams