Somewhere between the steam and slag at Scunthorpe, a fantasy is taking shape: the fantasy of national sabotage. The British Steel plant, rescued in 2020 by the Chinese firm Jingye after the British state had long ceased to care, is once again the site of dramatic state intervention, only this time the enemy is not deregulation or deindustrialisation, but China. Or, rather, the idea of China. The spectral figure of the Red State looms over the blast furnaces, accused—without evidence—of treachery and bad faith. Not a failing of capitalism, then, but a foreign plot.
This is the mood music in Westminster. “Sabotage” is murmured by the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, and echoed by a parade of Labour MPs and peers who have found a new language of security-through-sovereignty. Helena Kennedy, Liam Byrne, unnamed frontbenchers, they all hum the same tune: Chinese money is dangerous, our infrastructure must be “vigilantly” guarded, and investment must come with political loyalty stitched into the ledger. The phrasing is always conditional but always accusatory: “not every investor comes with goodwill,” “not every cheque is written with our interests in mind.” And of course the clincher—“some now investing in Britain are seeking more than profit… they are seeking power over our nation.”
But what nation? The one whose steel industry was gutted by decades of privatisation, outsourced to the market, and finally handed off to Beijing in a fire sale? Or the one now claiming sovereignty over blast furnaces it had all but abandoned? There is a convenience in the China panic. It allows the political class to skip over the story of British industrial collapse and instead write a thrilling spy novel about economic infiltration. It is not Jingye that shut down the north of England’s foundries, it is the ghost of foreign control. The state retreats, the market fails, and so we invoke the nation.
“It is not Jingye that shut down the north of England’s foundries, it is the ghost of foreign control. The state retreats, the market fails, and so we invoke the nation.”
Would we be reading this differently if the plant had been American-owned, say, under Trump? If a US conglomerate had sold off raw materials destined for Scunthorpe while negotiating a government bailout, would that too be read as “sabotage”? Would we call for an urgent review of all US investment in water, power, and transport? Or would we murmur about “commercial difficulties,” cite legal limitations, and insist on the special relationship?
The Scunthorpe crisis tells us less about China than it does about our own political pathologies. We are drifting towards an economic nationalism that demands capital behave patriotically, so long as it is not Chinese. Labour’s desire to look tough on foreign influence has been reshaped by the geopolitics of the moment. China is the adversary du jour, and Labour wants to sound serious about security. But what they cannot say, not without imperilling their fragile centrist consensus, is that this crisis is not about China at all. It is about the decay of the British state and its inability to act as anything other than a crisis manager for global capital.
“The Scunthorpe crisis tells us less about China than it does about our own political pathologies. We are drifting towards an economic nationalism that demands capital behave patriotically, so long as it is not Chinese.”
The irony is that we may yet end up more dependent on the United States. Already, the shadow of Trump’s second term looms over the Atlantic. If the UK now “pivots” away from Chinese capital, as many are urging, it will be to the open arms of Wall Street and the tech barons of Silicon Valley. There is no economic sovereignty in that direction either, only a different set of dependencies.
This is the real dilemma: we are not charting a path to economic autonomy but rebranding our submission to market forces. The government wants Chinese money without Chinese influence, American alliance without American domination. Labour wants industrial strategy without ownership, sovereignty without socialism. In the end, we may get neither. What we will have is this: one more managed crisis, one more gesture of state muscle, one more illusion of control in a system whose logic is not national, but capitalist.
As Angela Rayner stands in front of the furnaces proclaiming, “We’ve got the raw materials,” one wonders: who, exactly, is “we”? And what do we really own?
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