Steel Works

What is now the correct form for beginning a letter to the Editor of The Spectator? And what has Andrew Rosindell done wrong, that he should be the only sitting Conservative MP to have been elected before 2010 but to remain neither a Knight of the Realm nor one of His Majesty's Privy Counsellors? Man in the News, Sir Michael Fabricant, has a partner who also has a knighthood, not necessarily the first time that that has happened in the Conservative Party. By the way, unless Sir Michael sleeps in his wig, then ITV now has it within its power to put that whole question to bed. Release the tapes.

When Sir Andy Street, as he has since become, was re-elected Mayor of the West Midlands in 2021, then he defeated Liam Byrne, who now chairs the Business and Trade Select Committee, and who has called for the straightforward renationalisation of British Steel. That inevitability is being delayed, but this is still a day of hope, and even more so coming after the news of the impending approval of Sizewell C and of a fleet of small modular reactors. But who is going to own them? Remember Scunthorpe. This is why we have a State.

As it returns to the steel business, that State should not be shipping coking coal all the way from Japan any longer than was strictly necessary. It should be exploiting this country's own vast reserves of coal, both for that purpose and as part of an all-of-the-above energy policy that would, among other good things, end the crippling energy costs that had contributed so significantly to the crisis in the steel industry. Just as Donald Trump does not understand that tariffs would not conjure up factories in the United States overnight, so he does not understand that even when those did come, then they would not necessarily be where the old ones had been. But coal can be mined only where there was coal to mine. And you cannot make steel without it.

Even in the 1940s, no one serious, if anyone at all, suggested the nationalisation of Lyon's Corner Houses. The case for every nationalisation has always been strategic necessity. That argument continues to apply to water, energy, rail (which is not really being renationalised), the Royal Mail, and much else besides. Which of those has been improved by privatisation? Today, we have seen just how quickly the restoration of democratic political control can be achieved. Steel was the one nationalisation to which the Conservatives objected vigorously after the War, and they reversed it as early as 1953. But they did not vote against today's Bill. No one did. Everyone in Parliament has now conceded the principle, which, if it applies to steel, applies to all the others as well. As surely as for British Steel, what would you pay for, say, Thames Water? Just take it back. Just take them all back.

Free of the state aid rules of Margaret Thatcher's Single Market, Take Back Control. Public ownership is British ownership, it safeguards the Union, and its means of defending both the sovereignty and the integrity of this nation frequently had the word "British" in their names. Let them have it again, and let that be meaningful. There was indeed no rescue package for Grangemouth or for Port Talbot. In more than one sense, there is heavy rebuilding to be done.

But it cannot be done by those who were allowing the GP surgeries owner Assura to be bought by the American private equity giants Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Stonepeak Partners. Nor by those who were urging, as if they themselves would accept a pay cut of eight thousand pounds per annum, that the Birmingham refuse collectors capitulate, not even to a Labour council, but to the commissioners who had been appointed by the newly ennobled Michael Gove.