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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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.