Essay by Eric Worrall
Another steel mill just entered administration.
Government takes over Liberty Steel’s South Yorkshire plants to protect 1,450 jobs
Court ends Sanjeev Gupta’s control of UK’s third-largest steelworks as ministers seek to save 1,450 jobs
The UK’s third-largest steelworks has been placed under government control, creating an uncertain future for nearly 1,500 workers in Rotherham and Sheffield.
Insolvency courts granted a compulsory winding up order sought by creditors owed hundreds of millions of pounds by Speciality Steels UK (SSUK) – part of the Liberty Steel metals empire of controversial tycoon Sanjeev Gupta.
The company, which uses scrap metal to manufacture steel, will now be placed in the hands of the official receiver – a government appointed liquidator – and special managers from consultancy firm Teneo.
The government has agreed to cover the ongoing wages and costs of the plant while a buyer is sought.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/21/government-control-liberty-steel-south-yorkshire-sanjeev-gupta
This takeover of Specialty Steels UK follows the government takeover of British Steel in June;
Why did the government take control of British Steel?
17 June 2025
Jennifer Meierhans
Business reporter
Sean Seddon & Maia DaviesBritish Steel has secured a £500m deal to make train tracks for Network Rail.
It comes two months after the UK government took control of British Steel’s plant in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, to prevent it from closing.
…
Who else produces steel in the UK?
There are 1,160 businesses in the UK steel industry, directly supporting 40,000 other firms, according to government figures.
Tata Steel at Port Talbot in Wales was once the UK’s largest virgin steel producer but it turned off its blast furnace in September 2024, saying it was losing £1.7m a day.
An agreement with the UK government was reached which saw it commit £500m to help the company move to greener forms of steelmaking.
Other steelmakers in the UK include Liberty Steel, Celsa, Marcegaglia and Outokumpu.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y66y40kgpo
Why do I think this is net zero related?
British Steel backs calls for UK electricity price cuts
UK Steel today published a report on industrial electricity prices, demonstrating that a sizable gap remains between what UK steelmakers and their European competitors pay.
The trade body’s report also sets out three recommendations to bring electricity prices in line with European counterparts. As the steel industry is aiming to electrify through investment in new additional electric arc furnaces, electricity prices become even more crucial to the industry’s competitiveness, profitability, and future success.
Steel production is incredibly electro-intensive, and power charges are one of the largest barriers to sustainable steelmaking in the UK. With proposed steel industry switches to electric arc furnaces, it is expected the sector’s electricity consumption will roughly double.
The report finds that UK steel producers pay up to 50% more than competitors in France and Germany, adding £37-million to UK steel electricity costs. The price disparity is predominantly driven by higher UK wholesale costs and partly greater network charges.…
Read more: https://britishsteel.co.uk/news/british-steel-backs-calls-for-uk-electricity-price-cuts/
The sad part of this is the steel mill which just went into administration is next door to 6.5 billion cubic ft of gas, a hundred miles away in Lancashire. Steel plants would have no problem running on cheap gas. But nobody is allowed to touch that Lancashire gas because accessing that gas would require hydraulic fracking.
Imagine having an entire collapsing industrial sector which could be saved by a hundred miles of pipeline and a few gas wells, but nobody is willing to act to make it happen. Because that is the reality in today’s Britain.
> Imagine having an entire collapsing industrial sector which could be saved by a hundred miles of pipeline and a few gas wells, but nobody is willing to act to make it happen.
The United States thanks you for your sacrifice. Hopefully we will learn before it is too late for us as well.
His Father was a Communist. It seems to run in the Family.
Is it communism? Or is it a mental aberration, genetically connected perhaps, that afflicts some people such that reality and rationalism are somehow entirely absent. And worse, these horribly afflicted people will consider those possessing the increasingly rare qualities of realism and rationalism, even including common sense, imagine, must be contemptuously dismissed and be considered nothing less than evil!!
Dead’Ed Miliband, a graduate of Oxford University, might be a clever boy, but . . . he has no common sense, no ability to think rationally, and he appears to have a compulsive ability to lie repeatedly to the nation, the nation that provided his parents with protection from Nazi persecution.
Should I ever meet the complete and utter pillock, and should I happen to have a 9 iron in my hands at the time, well . . . it would get used with very serious intent.
No, it’s parasitism. People who have no skills except for BSing end up making a career out of it. Let me guess, his daddy was a rich communist ??
Those who favor communism tend to be those who actually believe they will be the ones in charge, after the revolution.
Yep, their matrix management system:
A horizontal line at 100 on the y-axis, labeled E (for Elitists).
A 100X longer horizontal line at 0.1 on the y-axis, labeled p (for peons).
The capitalization, or lack thereof was deliberate.
” a mental aberration, genetically connected perhaps, that afflicts some people such that reality and rationalism are somehow entirely absent. And worse, these horribly afflicted people will consider those possessing the increasingly rare qualities of realism and rationalism, even including common sense, imagine, must be contemptuously dismissed and be considered nothing less than evil!!”
That, Colin, sounds a lot like a very good description of the communists I know.
“Is it communism? Or is it a mental aberration”? One is both the same as the other.
Should I ever meet the complete and utter pillock, and should I happen to have a 9 iron in my hands at the time, well . . . it would get used with very serious intent.
Moderator: this has no place on this site.
As a reply to the content: in democracies this is not how we do things. We conduct a rational discussion and vote the offenders out at the next opportunity. All the signs are that this is going to happen in the UK.
What we do not do is go around making public statements about physically assaulting our MPs. If you are a UK citizen or resident, you should know about the recent history of attacks on MPs. And, as Archie Bunker used to say, ‘stifle yourself’.
Michel, I was being metaphorical. However, if it happened, notwithstanding he will never be held accountable for the damage he is deliberately causing the country . . . he would bloodywell deserve it.
These are the serious well reported ones – there are many more, probably tens, of less serious ones, not to mention the barricaded offices and elaborate security precautions that are now needed.
There is no defence for that kind of public talk. It is an incitement to violence towards MPs and as such a direct threat to democracy..
I am disappointed that moderation has allowed it to remain up.
Get over yourself, for chrisake.
And the censorship crowd toddles in. Let me guess, you 100% support the people of UK being arrested and jailed for saying they like bacon or stand silently on a sidewalk across the street from an abortion clinic? Yea, you are the problem.
“…to have a 9 iron…”
In the US a couple of years ago. An older black gentleman out walking, using a 5 iron as a ‘walking stick’. Arrested, and the ‘dangerous weapon’ apparently confiscated.
Interesting. I wonder if he had a nice study 34″ crook neck “cane” made of say hickory it that would have precipitated the same action?
Probably not. But: 34″ crook neck – about what I use these days, even just getting around the house. Hickory? Not that heavy. When I read your comment for some reason the words “single stick” popped into my mind. Checked with Duck Duck Go → Wikipedia – an interesting read.
And a certain Scandinavian beauty, married to ‘the worlds greatest golfer’; took a golf club to his car and other parts of him, as he was a serial adulterer.
I am much better with a wedge than a nine iron – so there.
I blame a lack of intelligence for both.
As I write Milliwind’s windmills are producing one point two gigawatts vs demand of 32. And below five for a week. It won’t do.
Utterly brilliant, isn’t it!!
And as I write, the UK’s wind and solar facilities are generating 2.02GW between them, this from a combined wind and solar installed capacity of 54.6GW. So these fantastically expensive pieces of kit, constructed from metals and minerals of which the UK produces NOT EVEN 1 TONNE, are operating at a load factor – efficiency – of 3.7%!!!!!!!!
Meanwhile, 22.7% of our electrical demand is being imported from Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and Norway.
And Miliband talks about home grown clean energy independence and energy security being provided by wind and solar equipment while . . . . we produce NONE of the metals and minerals necessary to construct that equipment or to even make the connections from where this equipment is installed?!!
The man is surely nothing less than a complete and utter idiot.
Ed Milliband is absolutely not an idiot. That is an absurd level of flattery.
“The man is surely nothing less than a complete and utter idiot.”
No, not a complete idiot … some bits are still missing !!!
One point twenty-one gigawatts???
Then it’s Back to the Future.
Back To The Future – 1.21 Gigawatts
Doc Brown shouldn’t have freaked out.
“Mr. Fusion” is just 10 years away!
The UK is set to be fully industrialized by Labor (no the irony of Labor destroying worker jobs) ans well as deliberately being reduced to importing more food. So sad for the land of Adam Smith.
You will have nothing and you will be happy.
You will own nothing and THEY will be happy.
and dead?
What Next, One-Way Ed ?
Sheer irony that the nation that once led the industrial revolution now embarks on the truly revolutionary quest to go back to the stone age…ha..if they only knew how to bang rocks…lol & sarc
But but the stone age ended when they ran out of rocks — hang on a minnit’ I see plenty of them in Parliament.
They should tap into some “Indigenous Knowledge” to relearn the art.
(But they might to open a flint mine or have it imported via clipper ships.)
On the bright side, Ed is forcing the UK to rapidly approach net-zero; electricity that is.
When the lights go out, we won’t be on the bright side
’10 INSANE ways Ed Miliband is making every Briton poorer.’
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/2098721/not-just-rachel-reeves
Wait. I thought that the high price of electricity was the fault of high priced Russian natural gas. But, natural gas is just sitting right there? Really? Someone’s not playing with a full deck of cards.
If Karmer, Miliband and Reeves could bang their heads together, they still wouldn’t have the brain capacity of a single amoeba.
Yes, you cannot get there from here by this route. Net Zero is now leading to high costs > high prices > businesses closing > lower tax receipts > higher borrowing…. And if you combine this with handing out whatever they ask for to your union funders and your far left party members welfare demands, this will be, is being, combined with a yawning budget deficit from rising expenses.
The end of this will be blackouts and an IMF bailout. The only question is which happens first. And at the end of the IMF bailout will be a lesson for the Left. The IMF will not use the expression, but they will conduct a master class in what austerity really is. A lesson that will last a full generation.
It looks like the UK will be finished long before the next general election. For their own survival the people have to remove the government?
Didn’t the people vote for this?
Elections have consequences!
As an ex-Pat living in the US, watching from afar, the conservatives also tried to pretend they were phony-socialists, so what’s left to vote for? Reform, destroyed 24/7 by the BBC? F-it, deal with it, or don’t. You have to live in it.
If you look at the last elections the voting was not for Labour but really for ‘None of the above’ by Tory voters in particular staying at home. Starmer led Labour won with 3m less votes than Corbyn led Labour.
Voting for the lesser evil is not a good way to elect a government. The voters need to wise up and stop being manipulated.
“…staying at home.”
Interesting. In Australia in the 1960’s one was entered into the electoral roll at age 21. Failure to vote and be marked off on the roll resulted in a £5 fine. I don’t know what the current situation is.
[How was the roll assembled? About two months before an election two police constables would go door to door, “Who lives here?” “How old are they?”]
No. Labour came to power with a smaller share of the vote than they had at the previous election, which was a resounding loss for them. It was a resounding vote against the Tories. If starmer had any sense, he’d realise just how tenuous Labour’s grip on power is and that he has no actual mandate for the massive upheavals he’s introducing.
Better join Franceland Spainland and other amusement parks in catering to and serving rich Americans and others visiting quaint old shops and crumbling historic places.
Let’s see a ranking of cost of production for steel from scrap. I’ll bet the UK is tops for cost.
The British Government must be breathing too much “clean air.” It’s causing them to go all goofy.
The believe that a nation can/should run its heavy industries on low density energy is insane. But maybe that’s the point it can’t. Western civilization (Europe) is in the process of slow suicide. Maybe they should just end it all by taking overdoses of Fentanyl and Midazolam just as the did to hospitalized COVID patients.
This is so stupid it takes my breath away. The solution is so simple it takes my breath away. Get the government out of the energy business and the steel business and all of these problems just go away. Stop being stupid!
It’s a familiar tale with the nut zero mob and their green steel-
Whyalla steelworks modernisation could cost new owner $8b, administrator KordaMentha says
We’re going to be a nut zero superpower-
Battery maker Energy Renaissance enters administration in Australia – pv magazine International
Blinkered politicians. And if not blinkered then ignorant. And if not ignorant then visionless.
So…. No longer a virgin?
Violated by successive governments’ stupidity.
The question has to be asked. Who is paying Milliband et al to destroy UK manufacturing? They clearly are following a set plan. Exactly who benefits from manufacturing in UK being shut down?
In the short term, the politicians, bankers & their friends & families with shares in global markets, but over the long term, China, India, and the Far East in general.