Jingye, the Chinese owner of British Steel, is likely to announce soon the closure of its Scunthorpe plant, with the threat to 2,700 jobs. This follows on from the ending of steel making at Tata’s Port Talbot plant last year.
Reports suggest that Jingye has cancelled shipments of coking coal for the blast furnaces and has not paid for iron ore due to arrive onsite. Without the raw materials, closure will be on the cards in weeks.
This further devastating news to the industry is on top of the swingeing tariffs on steel imported to the United States recently announced by Donald Trump.
The steel industry, which was privatised by the Tory Thatcher government in 1988, has been consistently run down under big business ownership. Scunthorpe is the last blast furnace in the UK, and the steel industry employs around 25,000 workers. This is a shadow of the position at privatisation, when there were still around 100,000 workers employed. Even that was a huge fall from its post-war peak of over 300,000.
Union response
The steel industry trade unions, Community, Unite and GMB, have been in negotiations with Jingye to save jobs, but the company recently rejected a government offer of £500 million of public money to invest in electric-arc furnaces.
The unions must fight to save the steel industry by leading a campaign of steelworkers, the local communities and the wider labour movement demanding nationalisation, with no compensation to the owners who have run down the industry over decades. The unions must also prepare industrial action to force this outcome.
Some union leaders have put forward nationalisation. GMB’s national officer, Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, said that a union meeting with workers on Wednesday 2 April had shown that “Jingye has no intention of running the plant responsibly. Nationalisation is now the only option to save UK steelmaking.”
But nationalisation on its own isn’t enough. Conservative-run North Lincolnshire council, Tory MPs, and even Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, have recently supported this demand. Their idea of nationalisation would follow when the state-owned steel industry only served big business requirements, not what the working class needed.
Instead, unions must fight for workers’ control and management of the industry as part of a socialist plan of production in which steel would play an essential part.
Kevin Parslow
