It took a steel crisis to get Parliament sitting on a Saturday. Not a genocide, not strikes, not the collapse of the NHS or local government, but molten metal. Blast furnaces are more sacred than ballots in Britain. They conjure myth—muck and brass, man and machine, Thatcher and Arthur. And now Starmer, who wants to look like Wilson with better tailoring, has stepped in to “save” British Steel. A spectacle of state intervention, hastily rebranded not as nationalisation (too French) but as “temporary stewardship”.
Reform aren’t wrong to see steel as national interest. What’s curious is how comfortable the Tories are letting Starmer carry the can.
The political optics are exquisite. A Labour government bailing out the smouldering wreckage of a Chinese-owned steelworks in Scunthorpe while Reform UK, the people’s champions of buccaneering nationalism, demand nationalisation. Nationalisation! It’s as if Farage woke up with the ghost of Tony Benn whispering in his ear. Reform aren’t wrong to see steel as a national interest. What’s curious is how comfortable the Tories are letting Starmer carry the can.
In normal times, one might expect Conservative backbenchers to foam at the mouth over “state interference” or “communist diktats”. But these aren’t normal times, and steel isn’t just steel, it’s jobs in places where the Tories no longer have seats to defend. Let Labour throw good money after bad. Let Labour look like the party of central planning, red tape and Beijing-style command economics. Starmer does the heavy lifting; the Tories get to call him Red Ed in a navy suit.
Jingye’s refusal to buy the coke (metallurgical, not Columbian) was a power move that backfired. By the time the government acted, it was a choice between legislative seizure or watching the plant die on livestream. The legislation itself passed with barely a squeak from the usual libertarians. A few mutters about “precedent,” but no one wants to be the MP who killed British steel, not when Reform is breathing down the necks of Red Wall refuseniks.
The crisis revealed just how hollowed out British sovereignty is. The blast furnaces don’t run on sovereignty, they run on coal imports and complex supply chains dictated by international capital.
The last time British Steel was in the headlines, Cameron and Osborne were still chasing budget surpluses. Back then, the answer was Chinese investment. Now, it’s legislative seizure. The arc of industrial policy bends towards farce. And further back still: the 1988 privatisation, the collapse of the European steel consensus, the retreat from state planning in favour of the global market. Each crisis writes another chapter in the long withdrawal of the British state from its own economy, until it doesn’t.
Starmer’s rhetoric is draped in the language of “security” and “sovereignty”, but it’s a selective doctrine. The energy grid, water supply, rail franchises—many foreign-owned, many mismanaged—don’t prompt emergency legislation or Saturday sittings. British Steel is the exception not because it’s unique, but because its failure is too visible to ignore. The flames in Scunthorpe could light up the electoral map if left unchecked.
Nationalisation isn’t back because the left has won the argument. It’s back because capitalism has run out of excuses.
No one mentioned the climate. No one asked how many more billions we’ll burn through before switching to green steel. The EU, at least, has a carbon border tax and a decarbonisation strategy. In Britain, we’re still trying to keep the 20th century open with 21st-century PR. For now, survival trumps transition.
The deeper point is this: the crisis revealed just how hollowed out British sovereignty is. The blast furnaces don’t run on sovereignty, they run on coal imports and complex supply chains dictated by international capital. Reform’s nationalism rests on nostalgia for a world where you could build a warship and your neighbour worked the production line. But that world was dismantled by the very economic model both major parties still refuse to challenge. The Tories sold it off. Labour now manages the ruins.
Starmer’s Labour is desperate to look serious, technocratic, managerial, made for power. But in stepping in to save Scunthorpe, he has invited a fight over the very thing he wishes to avoid: ideology. If the state must intervene to save steel, what else? Water? Energy? Housing?
Reform will crow about “British jobs for British workers,” and Labour will pretend this is a unique case, a “strategic asset” in exceptional times. But the lesson is already out there in the smoke: we still live in an economy where value is extracted not from code or content, but from heat, labour, and physical infrastructure. And when that infrastructure fails, so too do the fictions of the market.
If British steel is worth saving, then so too is a politics honest about why it failed. Not the usual story of Chinese dumping cheep steel or EU red tape, but the Thatcherite dismantling of industrial strategy, Blairite indifference to ownership, and a shared faith—across parties—that the private sector would always be more efficient.
This is Starmerism in miniature: pragmatic, poll-tested, allergic to ideology—but pulled into it nonetheless by the gravity of capital’s failures.
Starmer’s blast furnace moment is not a rebirth. It is a reckoning with the past.
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