It’s a curious thing, watching a Labour government scramble to nationalise an industry it has no real intention of running. When the crisis at British Steel sharpened last week, with the Scunthorpe plant in danger of imminent closure, it wasn’t a market solution that materialised. There was no foreign buyer parachuting in, no consortium of nimble entrepreneurs with a plan for green steel and just-in-time logistics. Instead, the state stepped in—not with a strategic industrial policy or a new model of public ownership, but with emergency legislation and a sense of grim necessity. The lights would stay on, the furnaces would burn, and thousands of jobs would be saved. At least for now.
The irony is thick. For forty years, we’ve been told that the state should get out of the way. That it is bloated, sentimental, inefficient. That business, unshackled from regulation and ideology, would deliver the goods. The privatisation of the steel industry under Thatcher was not just about economics; it was symbolic, part of a broader effort to strip the post-war consensus of its institutional base. The unions, the public sector, the idea of a shared economic purpose—these had to go. What replaced them was a kind of offshore capitalism, in which critical infrastructure could be bought and sold like second-hand furniture, and the people who relied on it were treated as unfortunate legacy costs.
Scunthorpe is the end of that line. The plant was sold to Greybull Capital in 2016 for £1. A year later, Greybull collapsed into administration. The next buyer, China’s Jingye Group, was hailed as a saviour in 2020, with promises of investment and modernisation. What followed was stagnation, then retrenchment. Jingye now wants out, citing rising costs and low demand. It has not invested in the transition to green steel, nor has it shown much interest in long-term stewardship. Why would it? From their perspective, Scunthorpe is not a national asset or a social obligation, it’s a line on a spreadsheet. When it stops being profitable, it becomes a liability to be jettisoned.
The real scandal isn’t that a private company wants to pull out of a business it no longer finds lucrative. It’s that we continue to act surprised when this happens. The entire model of private ownership, when it comes to industries like steel, is built on disavowal. The government pretends it has no role. The owners pretend they have a plan. The workforce is told to be patient, flexible, grateful. But when the collapse comes, as it always does, it’s the public that picks up the bill.
What this weekend’s intervention shows is that the state can run things. It already does, albeit in fragmented, backdoor ways: via crisis bailouts, quiet subsidies, and last-minute rescues. What it refuses to do is own this power openly, to make the political case for democratic control. Nationalisation is allowed only under the most exceptional circumstances, and only as a form of triage. The aim is always to hand the asset back to the private sector once it’s been stabilised—shorn of its debts, propped up by public money, ready to fail again.
And yet, despite everything, the idea persists that private is best. That markets know what they’re doing. That public ownership is a throwback, suitable only for emergencies. You can see this in the language used by ministers and commentators. The takeover of British Steel is not described as the start of a new era, but as a necessary evil. A regrettable but unavoidable act. The framing is defensive, technocratic, drained of ambition. It tells us something important about the limits of political imagination in Britain.
But if you want to build anything, from houses, railways, wind turbines, to public infrastructure, you need steel. And not just any steel. We need Green steel. Decarbonised production. Electric arc furnaces. Domestic supply chains. The Scunthorpe plant should not be clinging on; it should be at the centre of a national revival. Britain has no serious route to net zero without a modernised steel industry. The fact that we’ve left it to the market—again—is a failure of planning as much as politics.
Labour, for its part, has made no promises to reverse privatisation in any meaningful sense. Keir Starmer occasionally flirts with the language of national missions, but his platform remains firmly managerial. Rachel Reeves talks of fiscal responsibility and industrial strategy, but always within the narrow confines of market logic. Ownership, who owns what, and for whose benefit, is never seriously addressed. Instead, the focus is on incentivising investment, creating the right conditions for growth, restoring trust. It’s all very adult, very reassuring, and completely disconnected from the real dynamics of capital.
The truth is that public ownership of steel isn’t radical, it’s obvious. You don’t need to be a socialist to see that an industry central to national infrastructure, defence, construction, and decarbonisation should not be left to the whims of global capital. Nor should it depend on the goodwill of absentee landlords. What’s radical is the idea that the state should permanently outsource these responsibilities, while retaining the costs and risks. That we should go on pretending that the market will provide, long after it has stopped doing so.
The rescue of British Steel is not, in itself, a break from this logic. But it creates an opening. It shows that the political class, when forced, still knows how to act. The challenge is to move beyond emergency management and towards something like a programme, a plan not just to keep the lights on, but to build an economy that serves the public, rather than extracting from it. That would require not just investment and innovation, but courage. The courage to say: some things are too important to be left to the market. Some things belong to all of us.
Book Review (47) Books (51) Britain (16) Capitalism (9) China (7) Conservative Government (35) Creeping Fascism (12) diary (11) Donald J Trump (33) Economics (7) Elon Musk (8) Europe (8) Film (10) France (13) Gaza (7) History (8) Imperialism (13) Israel (9) Keir Starmer (7) Labour Government (17) Labour Party (8) Marxist Theory (10) Migrants (11) Palestine (9) Protest (13) Reform UK (8) Russia (10) Suella Braverman (8) Television (7) Ukraine (8) United States of America (62) Verso Books (7) War (15) Work (7) Working Class (8)
