Like the nursery-rhyme kingdom lost for want of a nail, Britain’s steel crisis is the latest reminder of the country’s nonsensical energy policy. When the Labour Party pitched its iteration of Net Zero to sceptical voters, it made much of the long-term national security benefits of the energy transition. No longer would Britain be beholden to foreign powers for its energy needs; instead, its wind and wave power would guide the world into a fossil fuel-free future. Unfortunately, the breakneck pursuit of Net Zero, begun under Theresa May, has added dangerous new vulnerabilities.

The Government’s panicked intervention to halt the closure Britain’s last surviving primary steelworks was a good and necessary policy, saving for the nation the theoretical ability to produce the tanks and warships its adventurous foreign policy demands. Yet keeping the Scunthorpe mill alive as a producer of virgin steel requires coking coal: there is no alternative technology yet in existence to that pioneered by this country during the Industrial Revolution. The mooted deployment of the Royal Navy to protect the shipments of coking coal necessary to feed the furnaces dramatically underlines the additional onerous burdens Net Zero places on the nation. Securing distant coal supplies strains already overstretched armed forces. It is simply not a serious response to an existential, self-made problem.

The near-extinction of British steelmaking capacity, and of the country’s ability to feed its own furnaces, is the fruit of decades of Government failure, for which both major parties deserve censure. Yet that this desperate last-minute dash to secure coal supplies comes just after abandoning the Whitehaven coking coal mine bid, following Government withdrawal of support for the venture, strikes at a policy incoherence to be laid at Labour’s door alone.

It is simply madness for a country blessed with some of the world’s richest coal deposits to find itself scrabbling abroad for coal it can easily produce at home, to higher environmental standards, without the additional carbon emissions produced by transporting it across distant oceans. The nation has found itself held hostage to an accounting trick, keeping carbon emissions off the national ledger by subsidising its production elsewhere — whatever the cost to the environment, the economy or the country’s security.

In these circumstances, it is possible to grudgingly sympathise with Jingye, Scunthorpe’s newly-maligned Chinese owner. Having offloaded responsibility to a foreign company for which the mill was a minor venture, the Government now appears to want China to take the blame for closing it when, rightly, the mine’s former bosses can complain that it is British energy policy which made the mill economically unviable in the first place.

Keeping British steelmaking on fragile life support, fed by hastily-sourced injections of fuel, is not a tenable policy. If the Government wishes to prove itself serious on national security, it needs to keep the ability to produce virgin steelmaking alive, with room to drastically scale up production in the event of an emergency. If it wishes to keep steelmaking alive, then it requires coal. If it requires a secure supply of coal, the only answer is native production.

The remorseless logic of Labour’s last-minute intervention thus leads inexorably towards either the abandonment of Net Zero, or a major carve-out for national security — a state of exception that also encompasses keeping the National Grid more stable and secure than Ed Miliband’s hasty energy transition has yet managed.

For all that Westminster intended to lead the world in the allegedly forthcoming shift to renewable energy, the only thing that has been managed so far is a unilateral Great Leap Backward, granting Britain the highest energy costs and the weakest industrial capacity of any major developed nation. Despite the rage of the last surviving neoliberals, Labour is right to congratulate itself for moving to nationalise Scunthorpe. Yet the logic of its decision leads the Government towards breaking a newer but somehow more powerful Whitehall taboo: finally jettisoning the self-imposed energy stranglehold inhibiting the nation’s economic survival.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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