It has been a steep decline. At the turn of the millennium, Britain possessed the fourth-largest industrial economy in the world. More than 800,000 people worked in foundational sectors: oil and gas extraction, refining, metals, chemicals, and inorganics. Contrary to popular belief, Britain’s energy-intensive production did not peak in the Seventies — but in 2002, supported by relatively cheap energy and booming global demand.

Then, between 2006 and 2008, Britain’s output and productivity began to fall. Globally, heavy industry shifted decisively toward China, hollowing out Western industrial employment. Britain, like its peers, lost jobs — but suffered more acutely. Heavy industry employment has halved from over 800,000 workers in the early 2000s to just over 400,000 today. Since 2008, Britain’s steel sector has nearly collapsed multiple times; the ammonia industry has died out; salt production has ended and aluminum production has rapidly declined. Production of cement and glass is down, while imports of the same materials are up. Those jobs were lost during a time of perceived economic and political stability, where countries would specialise and become ever more integrated. But due to tariffs, wars, pandemics and a general sense of insecurity, talk of reindustrialisation, once dismissed as pangs of nostalgia, is becoming de rigueur in Westminster. Robert Jenrick, who stands a good chance of being the next chancellor, has argued for “creating the conditions for Britain to reindustrialise, restore our proud industrial heritage and create good jobs for British workers once again.”

For different parties, “reindustrialisation” means different things. Ed Miliband envisages a “green industrial revolution” where Britain’s reindustrialisation is directly tied to his ambitious carbon reduction targets. For Nigel Farage, the term means cutting red tape and reopening the mines.

If reindustrialisation has cross-party appeal, it is because it intuitively makes sense that being able to manufacture complex equipment makes a nation stronger, more productive and more prosperous. This intuition has been tempered by economists who argue for economic specialisation and enjoying the reduced cost of goods by offshoring manufacturing to cheaper locations. But recent global events — Covid’s effect on supply chains; the Ukraine war’s effect on energy prices; the Iran war’s effect on shipping — have made this view increasingly hard to defend. Deindustrialised Britain grows its economy anaemically, if at all. The same is true of its productivity. As a result, the country’s hard power has rapidly diminished.

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Hence the cheerleading for reindustrialisation. This high-spirited rhetoric rarely acknowledges tradeoffs, but it ought to. This is because deindustrialisation was a price willingly paid for cheaper consumer goods from imports, increased welfare spending, periodic tax cuts, and progress towards meeting Britain’s environmental and emissions targets — or, at least, those targets that pertained to onshore activity rather than activity handed off to the developing world. Reindustrialisation, then, might require some of those dividends to be relinquished. Partly for that reason, none of the cheerleaders have yet made firm commitments for how much of our economy should be manufacturing, or what level of growth they would aim for. Currently, the concept of “reindustrialisation” is comparable in rigour to “soft power” and “clean energy superpower”.

Granted, the country has industrialised before. But the Britain of Pitt and Lord Liverpool, with its high wages, captive markets and cheap energy, was primed for such a transformation. Modern Britain, with its expensive energy, low levels of investment, and asymmetric openness to foreign goods, is certainly not. Reversing decades of insufficient investment and making Britain a major manufacturing power is going to be a mammoth task.

Some argue that it is a task not worth pursuing. The staple criticism has come from free-marketers like Daniel Hannan, who argues there is “nothing special about manufacturing”, and that globalisation is good for the consumer and the economy. Prior to becoming an MP, Labour thinktanker Torsten Bell argued that Britain should stay focused on being a world-leader in services. But the productivity statistics are on the side of the reindustrialists. Beyond the most rudimentary wood and textile craftsmanship, manufacturing is more productive per worker than average. Britain’s energy-intensive and resource-extractive industries employed 1% of the workforce, but accounted for nearly 3% of gross value added (GVA), an important metric of economic value. The average heavy industry employee contributes  77% more in GVA than the average worker.As for the advanced manufacturing sector — defined in the Government’s 2025 industrial policy as chemicals, transport, aerospace, machinery, and electrical equipment — it accounts for just 2% of jobs (721,000) but 6% of GVA (£80 billion). For context, London’s creative sector, the most culturally prestigious sector in the country, encompassing computer programming, video game development, film and TV production, generates just £64 billion with 730,000 workers.

If we accept that some level of reindustrialisation is desirable for economic and extra-economic reasons, how do we achieve it? First, we must understand why British manufacturing is in the doldrums. For many, the blame lies with Thatcher’s reforms. For others, it is the mismanaged mergers of the Sixties and Seventies.

I would argue that the real evidence of industrial decline, the kind that is most relevant today, occurred much later. Britain’s industrial malaise is not simply the delayed aftermath of the Eighties, nor an inevitable by-product of a modern service economy. It stems from three big problems arising over the last 30 years: high energy prices, underinvestment in capital equipment, and the uneven nature of global trade, where some countries are far more open to imports than others.

While the Thatcherite consensus had allowed for industrial growth, it was growth that was incredibly uneven. Pharmaceuticals, automobiles and aerospace prospered, but increasingly under the ownership of foreign investors. Heavy industry, like chemicals, metals and the machining of components, was offshored as a result of generating lower marginal returns. This partial atrophication made manufacturing in general much more dependent on imports. It also made it harder to scale up new industries. As a result, there have been almost no new British industrial giants formed in the 21st century. Successful new corporations like Ineos and Astrazeneca were formed from the scraps of previous giants like Imperial Chemical Industries.

The strength of the pound, and lenders’ demands for ever-higher margins in shorter timeframes, certainly did not help. Studies have shown that the UK during this period saw a uniquely significant contraction in jobs and a uniquely low investment in automation. We were coasting on the momentum of the 20th century.

That momentum is rapidly dissipating. Glass factories, refineries, and ethylene plants are closing. North Sea oil and gas production began declining in 2004, and the need for substantial investments in the electricity grid, which had been deferred for decades, drove up energy costs rapidly from 2005 onwards. These increases were compounded by the expansion of levies to support intermittent renewables.

Arguably as important as energy prices is the decline of the capital stock in manufacturing. This is a term that refers, essentially, to the total value of all the machinery, equipment and infrastructure accumulated to power Britain’s industrial base. The country is well below its peers in the purchase of industrial machinery. Some commentators have blamed the relative lack of industrial investment on the financial sector and private equity, both of which, it is argued, are overly focused on short-term returns. The decline of capital stock can also be seen as a supply-side problem: in other words, it is too hard to build and do business in Britain. For that reason, companies are unwilling to make large, capital-intensive bets on future manufacturing orders.

On that front — the supply side — policymakers could at least have worked toward making energy cheaper and capital expenditure more appealing. But a third great force has been hurting British manufacturing: the overcapacity of global manufacturing, exacerbated by uneven trade practices which benefit producers in some countries over others. Overall, global growth in manufacturing has slowed in the 21st century. But, some countries, most notably China but also Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan, have, in mercantilist fashion, prioritised market share over profit margins. This has led to massive overcapacity, which has deflated global prices for consumers but also pushed out Western producers.

British firms have weathered this harsh environment stoically, increasing worker productivity and keeping overall value roughly stable in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. But the consequence of this efficiency has been a degradation of overall capacity and the ability to compete in new markets. Being a major manufacturer of electric vehicles is a non-sequitur: Britain has little capacity to refine the chemicals that make lithium-ion batteries. Given that our government has decided to ban petrol vehicles in the near future, this means we could conceivably lose most of our car industry within a decade.

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With other Western countries increasingly adopting a dirigiste stance toward protecting their own industries, British companies are being lured elsewhere. The German government, in a new spirit of fiscal profligacy, has actively courted major manufacturers, attempting to lure British Rolls-Royce with the implicit promise of subsidies. The company has urged the UK to subsidise its engine production, arguing it will otherwise be forced to move abroad.

Whether the Government will give in to Rolls remains to be seen. No. 10 is already grappling with steel production, which has become the most visible industrial challenge. In 2024, Britain produced four million tonnes of steel, down 33% from 2023. This was less than Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, and Saudi Arabia — and only twice the output of Luxembourg. This might be seen as the fag-end of a long decline, but up until relatively recently, steel production was viable. It is worth noting that in Wales, which has been particularly hit in recent years, steel production peaked as late as 1997.

The Government’s recently published steel strategy will protect the industry through subsidies and tariffs. It sets a target to use domestic steel for 50% of consumption, up from 30% today. It also tightens the quota for excess imports and increases tariffs on those imports. Through the National Wealth Fund, the Government will provide £2.5 billion in funding to upgrade steel plants. The Government has also confirmed it will be a major buyer of steel for public procurement needs. This is a fairly meaty support package, and necessary to keep a steel industry here, but it leaves out the penalty of expensive energy. For as long as Britain’s industrial energy is among the most expensive in the world, the steel sector — which is highly energy-intensive — will suffer.

British industrial decline, then, is most visible in energy-intensive industry, but the decay is just as pronounced in the secondary stage of production: fabrication. Once manufacturing material has been produced in its primary form, it must be fabricated into products. This includes casting, forging and machining of components through the use of machine tools. Here, the importance of energy costs begins to give way to a lack of capital.

As an example of the fabrication stage, some components have to be forged using enormous hydraulic presses. A handful of facilities worldwide can produce 500-tonne steel ingots, required for nuclear reactor pressure vessels. Britain — through the Ministry of Defence’s ownership of Sheffield Forgemasters — remains one of only five such locations on Earth where such ingots can be forged.

While Forgemasters is a large operation, the majority of machining in Britain is done by thousands of small machine shops, which rely on repeat orders from longstanding clients. When Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) suffered a cyberattack, the existential threat was felt not only by JLR but also by suppliers such as Genex UK, which derives up to 70% of its business from JLR contracts.

This hidden economy is built around thousands of machine tools: a catch-all term for machines that cut and form components that are then assembled into products. Britain was once a major producer of such equipment. Today, most tools are imported from Germany, Japan, Korea, and increasingly, China. Despite having a similar industrial base, Britain consumes less than half as many machine tools as France.

The problem is stagnant demand and poor access to capital. Consolidation sounds appealing, but it is structurally complex. Most machine shops fabricate a low volume of highly variable components on thin margins. Yet their economic impact is disproportionate to their size. While a component may represent a tiny fraction of a nuclear plant’s cost, the ability to procure it quickly and locally could dramatically reduce project timelines and capital costs. There is circumstantial evidence from Korea and China that nuclear plant costs dramatically fall in line with higher domestic content.

These machine shops are the ligaments of Britain’s industrial body: small, numerous, and under severe strain. Start-ups like Ealing-based Isembard, which franchises software across machine shops, offer a glimpse of renewal.

To what extent could that renewal be made national? There are no obvious examples of major countries that industrialised rapidly, deindustrialised and subsequently reindustrialised. Rather than envisioning a second British Empire, an incoming government could credibly commit to make manufacturing 10% of GVA by the end of its first term, and 12-14% thereafter. This would represent a 25-50% expansion from today’s 8% figure, restoring Britain to its early-2000s position — not some imagined golden age. This would mean a larger industrial base, higher productivity, and greater capacity to complete significant infrastructure projects and defence orders quickly.

The price of this improved capacity: more costs for consumers for intermediate and finished manufactured goods, since industry is currently costlier here than abroad. Additionally, Britain will shed some jobs in the “creative” and “business services”, as an increase in domestic production will increase demand for labour, even with automation. While painful and politically difficult, these developments will be manageable and even desirable. While some increased consumer prices will make us poorer in the short term, this would be meaningfully offset by higher productivity jobs, higher wages, more exports and greater R&D spending.

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How can the Government get us there? Supply-side reform remains essential. Lower energy prices, reduced carbon levies, and R&D tax credits can help, but would require the end of the Net Zero project as it is currently constituted. The discretionary carbon taxes that inflate the cost of gas, and therefore electricity, should be scaled back. Allowing for more exploration and drilling in the North Sea would have a limited impact on prices, but would improve our balance of trade and keep high-paying jobs in Scotland. More ambitious plans to frack in Northern England could have a much more significant impact on prices. In the short term, nuclear power development would be costly, but in the long term would provide firm power at acceptable prices.

But cheap energy alone is not sufficient. Despite lower electricity prices, France has only marginally outperformed Britain since 2008. The primary benefit will be that key heavy-industry sites will not require government bailouts. Nearly three times more R&D tax relief is claimed by “office administrative and business support activities” than by machinery and equipment manufacturing. Much of this is thinly disguised tax arbitrage. Britain’s industrial R&D intensity is about half the global average, while its financial sector is nineteen times more research-intensive than said average.

An eminently achievable policy would be to provide grants for industrial machinery. This should be a key focus: the country’s manufacturing sector has a lower capital stock of equipment now than in 1995. Rather than spend billions chasing speculative technologies or subsidy wars with the EU, US, and China, Britain would gain more by directly financing capital equipment purchases — modernising workshops across the country. A £1 billion annual grant (under 2% of the £60 billion spent annually on industrial policy) for machine tools would double British purchasing capacity overnight. Those free-marketeers suspicious of a return to Sixties-style grants could be buttered up through cuts to energy levies, dubious R&D tax credits, and unmeritorious university funding.

But even with a government committed to reindustrialisation, trade imbalances make the task uphill. The rise of Chinese industrial power, now accounting for more than 30% of global manufacturing value, has depressed production in the West. While Trump’s US has been the most avowedly protectionist, the truth is Europe and India have joined the East Asians in using tariffs and subsidies to hold on to industry.

As the most open, least competitive industrial base in the developed world, British producers are the least well-placed to thrive in an environment where trade is fractured yet globalised. There are no solutions; only trade-offs. In my view, plenty should be sacrificed to make industry competitive again. The current government has accepted protectionism for steel. Though far from ideal, it is the least worst decision and bides us time to make Britain more competitive through reduced energy costs.

While a manufacturing boom would not be a panacea to all Britain’s maladies, it would improve our ability to meet those challenges. It would mean greater prosperity outside of London, a wider tax base and greater security. With greater wealth in the regions, it could allow for the reduction of welfare spending. The establishment of large, modern British manufacturers would give the nation a chance to compete across high-value sectors like drones and rocketry. This, in turn, would allow us to field a stronger armed forces without periodically raising our defence spending.

It is unlikely that the credit for such dividends would be monopolised by one statesman or government. In fact, those determined to make reindustrialisation happen will face significant opposition. A strong industrial base is rarely attributed to a singular individual, but to general good governance.

Reindustrialisation is anything but an easy win. Yet if politicians and civil servants continue to act like there are no hard choices, expect the stagnation of the 21st century to turn into absolute decline.

It is a striking departure for parliamentarians who are more used to posting and voting about climate change, Trump, Gaza, Ukraine, Pakistani airports — anything and anywhere but Britain. It is also a remarkable about-face for British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a lawyer whose entire career, up to the age of 50, was defined by applying supra-national human rights conventions to national law. And that is to say nothing of his campaigning on behalf of the European Union after he became a parliamentarian in 2015. What happened to prompt this sudden embrace of Britain’s best interests?

Closing the furnaces in Scunthorpe would have meant the end of steel production in the country that birthed the Industrial Revolution. In a world of snapped supply chains and growing geopolitical instability, Britain’s national interest in maintaining domestic steel production is self-evident. The problem is that the more that Labour ministers and parliamentarians refer to the “national interest”, the more hollow it sounds. After all, if Keir Starmer is only now turning to defend Britain’s national interests, what on earth was he doing before? If the whole point of being a national leader is to defend the national interest, why would you even need to say it?

Then we turn to the steelworks. How is it in the British national interest to keep the Scunthorpe furnaces running, if it wasn’t in the national interest to save the steel works at Port Talbot? How is it in the national interest to manufacture steel without maintaining the concomitant domestic capacity to produce the coking coal that is needed to make the steel, itself made from the filthy pollutants that our new green gospel commands us to leave buried in the ground? How was it in the national interest that British Steel was privatized and sold to foreign capitalists of an authoritarian superpower?

The national interest has been conspicuous by its absence from British politics for years if not decades. The past 30 years have been the era not of Britain’s national interests but rather of Britain’s international leadership. Britain stepped into conflicts in Libya, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; it sought also to be a leader in global efforts to tackle climate change, child poverty, the financial crisis, and terrorism. With so much leadership, so much winning, who needed the national interest? There was, to be sure, plenty of chatter across these years in think tanks and Foreign Office seminars about “our interests and values”. But it was taken for granted that our interests and values were happily conjoined in deepening Britain’s trading relationships, strengthening our global alliances, redoubling our international commitments and tackling global problems in Africa, India, wherever.

Blathering about interests and values while letting foreigners asset-strip British utilities and industries was possible for the past 30 years because we lived in a world of unipolar globalization. In this world, US military underpinned the global security regime, and economic globalization allowed for widespread economic growth. It was true that the mercantilist trading strategies behind Chinese industrialization never quite lived up to the doctrine of comparative advantage on which the case for free trade is usually built. But unipolar globalization nonetheless allowed for a fair degree of economic specialization to develop across a global division of labor. China produced the steel, we produced slide decks on how to ensure your supply chains were gender compliant.

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A few “rogue states” aside, in this old world order no one had to bother articulating a distinctive national interest. The US military underwrote national security, and everyone’s economic interests were essentially the same — enhancing global growth, deepening global trade and expanding global business. In this looking-glass world, industrializing China was in our interests because it powered global growth, letting us live by re-mortgaging our decrepit Victorian housing stock over and over again. This global compact came with the added bonus that it allowed us to substitute dirty blue-collar jobs (and people) with nice white-collar jobs (and people) and cheap foreign labor. This is a state of affairs that was foreseeable, foreseen and welcomed by both the Tories and Labour. Both parties abetted the expansion of the universities, not least in cities where industries had been gutted.

Britain had a precocious role to play in building this global world, starting with the Labour government’s soliciting of an IMF bail-out in 1976 in preference to installing capital controls. Later, in the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher endeavored to crush organized labor — the “enemy within” — and build Britain into the European Single Market. Globalization would never have worked had it not been a bipartisan affair. The business class wanted to restore profitability by crushing uppity unions and reaching beyond the nation-state, while the Left was less interested in representing workers’ material demands at the national level than it was in indulging in middle-class activism and virtue-signaling at the global level. For their own reasons, both Left and Right thus conspired to evade the democratic fetters of the nation-state, whether by shredding its civic representation, selling off national assets such as British Steel to foreign capitalists, and fleeing abroad on gap years to solve global problems.

Yet globalization could work only by gouging the nation-state. You could strip it back through privatization and transnational integration, but a shriveled remnant remained intact. By now its only remaining purpose was to act as a footstool for ambitious elites to step on. In this way they boosted themselves into a world where they could rub shoulders with Brussels regulators, New York bankers, Californian entrepreneurs, Russian oligarchs, Saudi royalty and Chinese communist billionaires.

Not only was the national interest an anachronism, but so too was the nation itself. In this world, it was little more than a dreary hinterland of provincial towns and rustbelt communities left behind by the exuberant cosmopolitanism of a wealthy London. The capital, straining to shed its provinces, hoped to establish itself as a de facto city-state plugged into global governance networks. Its mayor seems more concerned with tackling climate change and the war in Gaza than the prosaic problems of ordinary Londoners.

If Britain had played an important early role in building this new world order, it also played a precocious role in undercutting it with the popular vote to leave the European Union in 2016 — a democratic victory that would be a point of patriotic pride for any British government genuinely concerned with meaningful British leadership in world affairs. Starmer, of course, devoted the years after the referendum to trying to overturn it, straining to keep us embedded in the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union. This entanglement would have hindered this week’s national effort to rescue British Steel.

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Despite this record, the Labor government’s belated rediscovery of the national interest should be welcomed. This is because it indicates that, however weak our politicians may be, they are now being forced to turn inwards and justify their policies in reference to the American people rather than looking to solve global problems. What this means is that we now have the possibility of holding our elected representatives to account. By its very nature, the national interest is a representative claim made on behalf of a people who share the same territory and live under the same sovereign authority — the nation.

The problem for the people of Britain is that they do not — yet — exist as a nation. After all, what does it mean to speak of the national interest in a country in which the nation itself now figures so rarely? Public and municipal buildings — even the Foreign Office itself — are as likely to carry the trans pride and Ukrainian flags as they are the Union flag. Spontaneous popular patriotism would seem to be equally absent: walk around the center of any British city and you are more likely to see Palestinian flags hanging in windows, stickered onto lamp posts, in shops, more than the Union flag or the flags of any of its constituent nations. Eurosceptic populists like the leader of the Reform party, Nigel Farage, imagined that withdrawing from the EU back in 2016 would be sufficient for the British nation to stir back into life once all the suffocating Brussels red tape had been stripped off.

But the British nation had not only been mummified but buried under the garish monuments of Global Britain. This was not the apotheosis of the British nation, but rather the British nation turned inside out — a Britain whose success was measured by how many migrants and how much foreign investment it could attract rather than how far it defended the lives of its citizens. Whatever folk memories of British nationhood may stir the masses, the fact is that the nation is long gone, like most of British industry and national assets, to privatization, globalization and neglect. Just as it will take more than state ownership to revive British Steel, so it will take more than selfies and nationalizing failing companies to rebuild a British nation.

The greatest theorist of modern sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes, made clear that national unity can only meaningfully exist in the form of sovereign political representation. “It is the unity of the representer,” he wrote, “not the unity of the represented, that maketh the [sovereign] one.” This means that if there is to be a new British nation, it will also need a new state to represent it. The fact that the Westminster state is being forced to resume thinking in terms of national interest gives this project of national renewal greater urgency. This is because none of the established parties in parliament can be entrusted as custodians of the national interest. Already government ministers are refusing to confirm whether we can actually keep the Scunthorpe furnaces running. Once again Tory and Labor conspire against the British people: the Tories decry the Labor Party’s Net Zero commitments that make British industrial energy so expensive, yet it is they who privatized British Steel to begin with.

If there is to be a new British nation forged with new British steel — both real and metaphorical — it will require the British multitude to start thinking about what we share in common and how we can impose those collective priorities on our elected representatives. In short, we will need to start thinking like a nation. This means we will all need to make sure that we are thinking about the national interest whenever we consider any question of public life — whether it be our energy supply, educational reforms, academic freedom, individual liberty or national defense. The national interest is much too important to be left to the politicians.

A few years after Winn’s excavations, the first furnaces were built, and the Domesday hamlet of Scunthorpe started producing pig-iron. The borough’s old crest features a blast furnace belching flames, with the redolent motto: “The Heavens Reflect Our Labours.” Soon, the county’s companies started turning the iron into steel. By the end of the First World War, Scunthorpe produced 3% of the UK’s steel, some of it armouring the first military tanks, invented in Lincoln; by the start of the Second, it was producing 10%, some of it used in D-Day landing craft.

Since then, Scunthorpe metal has gone into everything from Sydney Harbour Bridge to the London Eye. But this elemental industry is rusting away. British Steel has recurred in the last decade’s headlines, almost always linked to job losses. Now, up to 800 of its remaining 3,200 steel jobs are at risk — a painful reversal for Lincolnshire.

Scunthorpe’s steel was for many years a magnet, attracting workers from all over Britain, and sometimes overseas — Germans before the Second World War, Eastern Europeans afterwards, Asians in the Seventies. In 1960, almost a third of Scunthonians (around 20,000) were directly employed in steel. A BBC documentary from that year, Scunthorpe is Booming, shows a town of bustling streets, with optimistic interviewees talking about all the things they could buy thanks, directly or indirectly, to steel — cars and foreign holidays and “tellies” — although a few did express reservations about the social effects of all this dynamism. Industries sprang up to cater to steel’s ever-lengthening supply chains, and all these new consumers — including Golden Wonder crisps. (Some locals claim the cheese and onion flavour was invented in the town.)

It was Steve Cook who cast Scunthorpe’s last ingots, in 2000. He started at British Steel in 1968 with just four O-levels, and retired in 2007, having risen to the rank of Quality Manager. Sitting in his immaculate house within earshot of the furnaces, he exudes quiet pride: “Scunthorpe was renowned for making one of the best steels in the world, and the name British Steel was synonymous with quality.” He recalls an avuncular employer, which sponsored his studies in metallurgy, then provided a job for life. The town, he remembers fondly, largely revolved around shift-times, with hooters announcing shift-changes. Streets would fill with men on bicycles and then as suddenly empty again, an almost instinctive mass movement of those who were busily forging the future. Now the town’s commuters, faces fixed to their phones, are living in worlds of their own.

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Not everyone enjoyed their time working in Scunthorpe steel. Conditions were hazardous in the early days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steelworkers would work 12-hour weekday shifts, and 24-hour shifts on alternate Sundays, with no extra pay even on Christmas Day. Veterans of the Twenties recalled their lunches being layered with fine iron grit. There were frequent accidents: on the worst day, in 1975, 11 workers died when one of the town’s iconic “Four Queens” furnaces blew up. As recently as 2021, a fireball erupted unexpectedly at the British Steel works, although luckily no-one was hurt. Last year, a 27-year-old worker was killed falling from a crane.

And not all the social impacts of the works were positive. Influxes of large numbers of young single men, and the Tartarean thirstiness of their work, resulted in problems with public drunkenness; as early as 1860, extra constables had to be drafted in. Employers took a zero-tolerance approach, with workers liable to be sacked if they had any alcohol on their breath — except for one steelworks, which ran what must have been a highly lucrative “wet canteen” into the Seventies.

A community spirit nevertheless emerged, grounded in shared experience and Methodist morality (nearby Epworth was John Wesley’s birthplace), and reinforced by institutions. Technical colleges and grammar schools, a hospital, a theatre, and an array of social and sporting clubs all began to appear, most famously Scunthorpe United, founded in 1899, and nicknamed “The Iron”. Workers wistfully recall a steely solidarity, with its own vocabulary — casters, feedstocks, gangue, sinter, trunnion — and a confidence borne of mastering dangerous elements for their own and everyone’s benefit. Steelworkers took on an almost mythic quality at times in the popular imagination, brilliantly skilled men silhouetted against incandescent orange, controlling leviathan cranes that swung 130-tonne ladles filled with 280 more tonnes of molten menace. Today’s call-centres, industrial parks, and offices are pallid by comparison.

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When British Steel was born, in 1967, as the British Steel Corporation (BSC), there was much excitement about “the white heat of technology”. Innovations would, it was argued, remould the tired old post-imperial country. BSC emphasised quality over quantity, investing constantly in technical research. Britain had always been a world-leader in steel — but the pace of change had sped up. Some of the cars snapped up by Scunthorpe’s happy Sixties shoppers would have weighed a ton and a half of mostly British-made steel, but cars were becoming steadily lighter and smaller. There was less and less demand for Scunthorpe’s product, even before the whole motor industry went into the doldrums, along with British shipbuilding.

Then as now, successive governments failed to capitalise on British technical ingenuity. Ted Heath hoped that the new local authority of “Humberside”, into which Scunthorpe was lumped in 1974, might be an English Ruhr. But BSC always found itself fighting, often unavailingly, against cheaper Asian imports and other countries’ tariffs. The would-be Ruhr sometimes seemed at risk of becoming more of an American-style rust belt.

Enter: the Iron Lady. In the first two years of her reign, Margaret Thatcher appointed the uncompromising Ian MacGregor as chairman of BSC. Two of Scunthorpe’s four ironworks were closed. A December 1979 announcement of swingeing cuts at Scunthorpe was dubbed “Mr MacGregor’s sick Christmas card” by the town’s mayor, and led to a 13-week strike. But MacGregor was up for a fight, and ultimately, he won. In 1980, BSC had employed 166,000 nationwide, and lost £1.8 billion every year; by the time MacGregor left in 1983, it employed 71,000, and annual losses had been cut to £256m. In 1985, it recorded its best results since the Sixties. Scunthorpe was a crucible of a new economic order, melted and remade by monetarism — but there was a human cost, as in the mining communities of the North. Unemployment nationwide was almost three times what it is now.

Meanwhile, the nation was losing its grip on the industries that built it. Now a profitable company, BSC was privatised, before being absorbed into the British-Dutch Corus Group — the biggest steelmaker in Europe and the third-largest in the world. Corus was itself taken over, just in time for the financial crash, by the Indian firm Tata, which ended up selling it in 2016 to a venture capital firm for £1. After reintroducing the nostalgic name, the firm sold the plant on in 2019 to China’s Jingye Group, which now operates as British Steel. With every takeover, hundreds of jobs were lost; since 2007, Scunthorpe’s annual steel production has halved from 5m to 2.5m tonnes. This most substantial of great British industries is now forced to trust in overseas investors with no stake in the borough, and its rooted community relies on boardroom decisions in Beijing. Britain’s steel production is, after all, something of an afterthought from a Chinese perspective; in 2019, the UK produced just 7m tonnes of steel, compared with the 996m made in China.

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By David Rose

The now barely British British Steel, reeling under high energy costs, is a pressure point for the Government. On the one hand, there is the wish to protect jobs in a “Red Wall” seat, won for the Conservatives in 2019 by the granddaughter of a steelworker. On the other, there is a national commitment to Net Zero carbon emissions, and steel accounts for around 14% of UK industrial emissions. Recently, British Steel has threatened to shed at least 260 jobs at Scunthorpe, and maybe as many as 800 — a quarter of all the jobs left — unless the Government gives it money to invest in greener electric furnaces. The Government has offered £300m, but negotiations appear to be foundering, because the money is thought insufficient, and comes with preconditions about guaranteeing employment for a decade. If all these Scunthorpe jobs do go, many Scunthonians fear they would be followed inexorably by others.

The Government claims to be committed to the industry, although support sometimes seems uncertain, and no new measures were announced in the latest budget. Steel does not contribute much directly to the UK economy — just £2 billion in 2020, when it accounted for 1.2% of manufacturing output and 0.1% of UK jobs. Still, there is strong ongoing and projected demand for steel — for projects ranging from HS2 to healthcare, flood defences to the military — and much of it could be produced here. Better to have our needs met in Scunthorpe than Baoshan, surely.

Industry veterans are sceptical about the Government’s Net Zero priorities. David Amoss, who spent 30 years working in Scunthorpe, points out: “The steel’s still got to be made and it may as well be made in Scunthorpe as in the Far East. I find this carbon footprint thing an absolute distraction and a nonsense. Not that I don’t believe we’re destroying our own planet, but if we don’t do it someone else is going to.” Steel that is not made here will just be made in another country, perhaps one with weaker environmental safeguards, and boosting their economy instead of ours. Steve Cook concurs: “From a global point of view, it’s just shifting the problem elsewhere.” Besides, closing down both furnaces could cost more than £1 billion.

Manufacturing has long been a victim of modern Britain’s focus on service industries over making things the world both needs and wants. “If steel does go, as a manufacturing country we’re buggered,” says Amoss. “I fail to understand how any country can really exist with any sort of wealth if it doesn’t make anything and consumes a lot.” To those who built their lives around industries like steel, today’s Britain can seem an unkind as well as unwise country, ungratefully casting off its past and recklessly mortgaging its future in the interests of expedience and profit.

The story of steel in Scunthorpe is unique, but it echoes that of the North’s, or Wales’s, mining communities. Our nation is replete with towns like this: so strongly associated with its industry that it is almost impossible to envisage existence without it. After 150 years of unglamorous and unrelenting endeavour, Scunthorpe’s whole reason-to-be has suddenly become ethically suspect, its Britain-building citizens at risk of being abandoned. Can a forward-looking national realism, drawing on an old sense of obligation, compete with today’s green and globalised agenda? This time-tempered town is not the only one nervously awaiting an answer to that question.

Fuelled by our desire for ever cheaper goods, the world has collectively sleepwalked into a supply-side dependency on the People’s Republic.

The gamble had been pitched as a trade-off. China was expected to evolve democratic norms and embrace relations with the international community, while we got richer from globalisation. But we have been played.

Whether it’s clothing and factory-fashion, personal protective equipment or hardware parts, too many of our manufactured goods today rely on a ‘Made in China’ supply-chain. At the same time as it was busy taking control over our manufacturing, China was busy cloning western software, via her lackadaisical respect for international copyright rules.

And while the world relies on China for hardware, China avoids software dependency on outsiders by creating substitutes: TikTok to replace snapchat, Weibo instead of Twitter, WeChat & RenRen for Facebook. Indeed, there is an alternative Chinese version for almost any platform.

Further reading

We've cosied up to China for too long

By Nick Timothy

With manufactured goods and hardware ‘Made in China’, and software increasingly ‘Cloned in China’, what of natural resources? Through the ‘Belt & Road’ initiative — a ‘21st century Silk Road’ connecting China to Europe over a network of land and sea trade routes, the People’s Republic has embarked on huge infrastructure projects in 60 countries, including loans and construction projects that secure key ports and mines as collateral to China for payment.

Look to Pakistan, African or southeast Asian nations to see China’s rapid expansion in ownership of mines and ports. Look to the UK and China’s attempts to secure our telecoms industry via the Huawei deal, her recent purchase of British Steel, and her quest to secure the nuclear power industry. Beijing even secured a deal to develop British nuclear station Hinckley point C in Somerset, thus paving the way globally for China to enter the global market to dominate nuclear power.

Over decades, we have naively outsourced or lost manufacturing, software, natural resources and critical infrastructure to China. The economic benefits of globalisation are well trodden, yet as Covid-19 has shown, it has left our society vulnerable during a major crisis, unable to manufacture the most basic of necessities such as PPE. Meanwhile, China has achieved self-sufficiency.

While pursuing economic dominance abroad, China’s communist one-party state has centralised political power at home, gained unprecedented command over her own population via wide ranging and well-documented spy-tech, and placed anything between 1 to 2 million Uigur Muslims in gulags.

Considering what we know of colonial history, there is little room for doubt that China is at a pre-colonial stage. States at this stage attempt to centralise domestic power under a strong leader, dominate global supply chains and monopolise industry, all the while expanding abroad to secure natural resources. China is aggressively pursuing total national self-sufficiency, and the question arises as to why.

Further reading

China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

My conclusion is that China is preparing for war: total, not limited war. The kind that seeks to rebalance the world order, tipping it in her favour by replacing the US as the dominant global power. Historically, major conflicts have arisen when the leading global power is challenged by a rival, a problem known as the Thucydides trap — and China is expected (by some metrics) to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy this decade.

Also, and crucially unlike us, China is preparing for the next type of war. The People’s Republic knows that she cannot beat the US militarily — and she knows that type of ground war is almost over.

Instead, by securing global supply chains, maintaining IT independence, and having a cast-iron grip over her own population, China can focus on building her cyber and biological war capabilities while remaining relatively safeguarded against the same herself. Considering all of this, from steel to nuclear to telecoms, our policy towards China until 2020 can best be described as one of miserably failed economic appeasement. From China’s perspective, she has successfully gifted us a Trojan Horse.

So what is the solution? Do we take that bait and prepare for war too? No. We must first understand what happened, and grasp how it came that we so willingly handed China the very tools by which to defeat us.

For too long, China has had a strategy for dealing with us, while we have had no strategy for dealing with China. We must urgently pivot our strategic relationship, one that entails assuming that China is in a Cold War with us already, and ends our current naivety.

We must minimise our total global supply-chain dependency on China, or any one nation for that matter. Trade with China, yes, but we must ringfence critical infrastructure: nuclear, telecoms and natural resources such as steel.

As recent politicisation of the WHO highlights, the post-war international community — supposedly governed by the UN — is no longer serving its purpose, and perhaps more than ever the UN faces a crisis in moral authority. Instead, NATO-style, we must reorder our strategic and military alliances around the Pacific and build an international consensus against the broader expansionist desire of the Chinese Communist Party.

Further reading

Covid-19 has exposed our financial fragility

By Jonathan Tepper

Just like with nuclear non-proliferation, there must be newly-developed global consequences for negligence in cyber and bio hazard safety. Post-Covid, we would be wise to build a new global consensus on which punitive measures are suited to states that violate our cyber or biological safety.

Whatever happens in China does not stay in China. Whereas our Orientalist based ‘othering’ of China created this blind spot, only our hubris and naivety would allow for us to continue thus blind. We have been outmaneuvered, but this pandemic has magnified our failures and brought them to the fore. We would only be deserving of loss if we did not learn the lessons now.