"Close your eyes and think of England," they used to say, but today we must open our eyes and take a good, hard look at our cousins across the Atlantic. Today's story is a bit convoluted, so I'll try to stick to the big-picture elements — but it is emblematic of Britain's self-inflicted decline.
The industrial town of Scunthorpe is home to Britain's last operating steel mill. While the corporate sign in front might say "British Steel," the company's owner since 2020 is a Chinese industrial giant, Jingye, operating out of Beijing. Jingye claims to lose about £700,000 (about $925,000) each day keeping Scunthorpe's furnaces running. The company says that's due to high energy costs, environmental expenses, and competition from lower-cost producers around the world.
All big companies must deal with global market pressures, but Jingye's other two loss-driving expenses are due to London's insistence that Britain moves to a "net-zero" economy. Scotland's largest oil refinery at Grangemouth closed earlier this year "after struggling to cope with soaring energy costs, carbon taxes and Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences."
Jingye threatened to shutter "British" Steel at the cost of 2,700 jobs, so Parliament stepped in to take control during an emergency session on Saturday. The emergency was because once a blast furnace is turned off, it can't be switched back on like a light switch. Think millions of dollars and weeks of downtime.
While British Steel dangled from a government lifeline, Labour's Minister of State for Industry, Sarah Jones, was on Times Radio yesterday saying that British Steel would eventually transition to zero-emission "hydrogen to make direct reduced iron," a technology that doesn't yet exist and won't come cheap. In the meantime, I suppose Britons will have to absorb British Steel's million-dollar-a-day losses until DRI is available to generate even bigger losses.
There's been enough finger-pointing from both sides to conduct all nine of Beethoven's symphonies during a Hulu commercial break. So let's not even get into all that. The issue is that British Steel is — once again — effectively nationalized. Anyone who knows anything about post-war/pre-Thatcher Britain understands how badly that went the first time around.
Or for a more recent example, look at Chavismo Venezuela.
You'd have to be a fool to put money into British heavy industry so long as both Labour and the Tories remain committed to legislatively mandated deindustrialization via Net Zero. Now that Parliament is the effective owner of British Steel, they're likely stuck with it. So if — when? — the mill at Scunthorpe goes dark, Britain will have achieved an ignoble first: they'll be the only G7 nation with zero domestic steel production.
Britain without steel is like Britain without bangers and mash.
I've written some about the ongoing deindustrialization of Germany, Europe's (former?) economic powerhouse. But the process might be even further along in Britain.
An increasingly Venezuelan economy with an increasingly Islamic culture and an atrophied military is not the future I envisioned as a budding Anglophile teen — back when Margaret Thatcher and pre-Woke Doctor Who exemplified modern Britain in my eyes.
On reflection, deindustrialization might not be the correct word for that country's accelerating move toward economic, military, and cultural irrelevance. Perhaps the correct word is de-westernization.
Welcome to Gran Bretaña, comrades. Or is that al-Biritaniya?
"There will always be an England," Britons sang when their island nation stood alone against the conquering Nazis.
Will there?
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