It's the energy price, stupid.

Blame Ed Miliband as much as the Chinese for killing British Steel.

Don’t expect to see a lot more of this. (Photo by yasin hemmati on Unsplash)

Trades unionists and anonymous civil servants are clear who the baddies are in the great British Steel rip-off.
It is the dastardly Chinese who have been running down the blast furnaces at Britain’s last “virgin” steel plant. That is virgin in the sense of basic, railway-grade steel, not Richard Branson’s latest venture. They’ve done this, it is said, so that they can force Britain to import cheaper steel from China to use in their rolling mills.

Well, perhaps. The UK Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, doesn’t go quite as far as to accuse the Chinese of playing with a marked deck. But it is clear that the UK Labour government is deeply suspicious of the intentions of Jingye, the company that owns the Scunthorpe steel plant, and employs its 2,700 workers. The Treasury minister, James Murray, told the BBC Today programme that Jingye has “behaved irresponsibly”. The suspicion is that they are dumping cheap steel on the UK—the swine—while they deliberately let our blast furnaces die a cold death. China has form on this, but so do most heavy manufacturing countries.

But wait a minute. I wouldn’t trust the Chinese Communist Party as far as I could throw Donald Trump, but there is just a hint of a rush to judgement here. I mean, did you notice what I said above: this company wants to use cheaper steel in its mills—steel that can be blasted, finished, and shipped ten thousand miles to the UK for processing—and is still cheaper than anything produced at Scunthorpe. That looks to me to be the kind of business case that manufacturers have been using for the last two decades to justify outsourcing manufacturing to China.

The reason Donald Trump did a hasty U-turn on his punitive China tariff was because Tim Cook of Apple rang him and warned that if his daft trade war went ahead, the price of an iPhone would double. China exports one hundred million of these phones to America—worth around $40 billion or so. The Donald quickly realised that he was going to have to suck it up and “kiss China’s ass”, thus further trashing his—and America’s—credibility. But what has an iPhone got to do with Scunthorpe?