Worth remembering British Steel was sold under Boris’s Conservative government. People knew ageing blast furnace production was unsustainable without major investment in electric arc furnace technology, yet it was left to decline until the government eventually had to step in to save 3000 jobs.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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It’s not that blast furnaces were unsustainable, it was that no-one wanted to order their steel. Unlike arc furnaces, blast furnaces are destroyed by the act of turning them off. As the government wanted a UK source of steel for military strategic reasons (but not the steel itself while cheaper imports were available) they were paying to keep the furnaces idling at a cost of £400k per day.
So we've just bought a failing company? That doesn't sound good.
So I get that steel making might be a strategic national capability that we need to maintain, but is the government going to put the necessary investment into it? They seem incapable of investing in anything.
This should be an argument for a minimum basic income, as these thousands of people are effectively being paid by the state to sit at home because British Steel has no orders on the books.
How about instead we force taxpayers to pay the shareholders of a failing company upwards of a hundred thousand pounds per worker whose job is being saved?