This reminded me of an article in The Economist published last year, April 2025:
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
If British politicians worship voters who are no longer among the living, it is natural that they do the same to a version of the British economy that has long departed. “There are people in this country who love to talk down our manufacturing,” said Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, while speaking in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) factory in Birmingham. During the 1970s, one in four people worked in manufacturing, like Sir Keir’s dad, who died in 2018. Now fewer than one in ten do.
Manufacturing, a small part of the economy, plays a big role in politics everywhere. Britain is no exception. A speech at a JLR plant has become a rite of passage for any leading politician in recent years. Dead Man’s old job comes first for Britain’s politicos. The lives of workers in Britain’s services economy come second. True, manufacturing’s weak performance after the financial crisis is one reason for Britain’s woeful productivity growth. Yet politicians cling on to a primitive vision of it. “He made things with his hands,” said Sir Keir of his father. That modern manufacturing requires oodles of educated workers is ignored. Living graduates play little role in political discourse beyond politicians moaning that there are too many of them. After all, Dead Man did not attend university. Why should his grandchildren bother?
what a bizarre article, completely disconnected from reality. in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for more than 2 decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build HS2, that's projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world. The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
Indeed and ironically most British people refuse to eat the species commonly found in UK waters, e.g. mackerel etc.
Because the Brits are so fussy, most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
It’s only possible for Dead Man valorizing politicians to be elected because much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
> much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
Well, yes. But not many of them worship the generation who were mostly responsible for voting in favour of Brexit (60% support among those aged 65 and over at the time of the vote).
I think they do, actually. They just have a disconnect about it. But e.g. removing the triple lock is unpopular not just among those of an age to be affected by it.
Half of all steel in the UK is imported anyway, and there are many places to obtain it. Unless the UK goes to war with most of the world at the same time, it’s not going to have trouble getting steel.
It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.
Yep, same can be said of manufacturing capability in general. If you don't have a manufacturing base then inevitably when there's a war you may find yourself unable to build defense components.
You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.
The food example, is the exact reason for large farming subsidies in the European Union. These were implemented as a founding initiative, due to the experience of food shortages during the second world war.
A great number of things could be considered critical. Due to the nature of when access could be cut off, the main thing countries likely worry about being able to access, is things humans need to stay alive, and things needed to wage war.
Farming subsidies are one of the most criticized parts of the EU. My comment isn't in support of it. But even so, subsidy is quite different from compulsory purchase. The question is: why is steel special. Not in a no-action-vs-some-action way, but why so aggressive?
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
Obviously there are a lot of important things you need to keep a country running, but steel is a key input a in a huge number of very important sectors (infrastructure, military, automotive etc.) so having some ability to produce your own steel seems a sensible hedge.
Food tends to be a lot easier to produce, and many countries do often subsidize their food production, as well as have mercantilistic policies to ensure food production is kept locally.
Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
Interesting how they haven't repeated in this article earlier claims that the Chinese purchase of the steelworks was a strategic move to slowly destroy the blast furnaces by letting them cool under pretext of low demand.
Mike Parker, the school’s director of marketing, wrote on LinkedIn: “Whatever you read, this isn’t a VAT story. It isn’t a ‘falling rolls, unstoppable decline’ story. The truth is deeper and more complex and, eventually, the truth will out.”
The government is forced to sell steel at a loss, because all the buyers for whom this is a such a vital supply would otherwise buy cheaper imported steel, every single one of them.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
2 things:
a) Government plays a part in the cost of things - especially years of mis-investment around energy generation has sent British prices to the stratosphere and employment taxation levels greater than those 'cheaper' producers.
b) The 'cheaper' producers are still _producers_ and thus have control - if they need to hoard their own supply they will, or if they need to leverage it for some political gain they might.
I assume, ultimately western nations will have to adopt what already exists for agricultural goods for production as well. I am afraid it will end as a per-worker subsidy analog to per-area-of-land for lack of a better metric but in the end, that is what will be necessary if one wants to keep any industrial capabilities.
one of the most hilarious examples of how the current wh admins false protectionism, in my mind, is the crucible steel bankruptcy in jan/feb 2025.
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
One more tiny piece of the global system of international order falling apart.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
One can argue whether, in abstract, this was a good idea.
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
Tangent: disturbing to see the BBC thinking they're going to get far by paywalling quasi-randomly in North America. At least right now it's trivial to ignore.
Tangent: disturbing to see many North American news sites thinking they're going to get far by region-blocking European visitors because they don't want to be GDPR compliant ;)
The annoying thing about the BBC paywall is that it is implemented by using different domains, so (for example here) people in the UK go to bbc.com instead of bbc.co.uk
I'm not seeing this particular paywall, but disturbing in that the BBC is so awful and stupid at this, presumably.
For many years I would have gladly paid the BBC $20/mo for some way to legally watch Top Gear and Doctor Who. That's it, just two shows and I'll give you more than I give Netflix. They never offered a single legal mechanism available to US citizens, so, well.....don't admit to crimes on the internet and all that.
It was offered much later than iPlayer was for the UK, but to claim they 'never' had an option for US audiences is false when they have had Britbox for almost 10 years
Not only was Britbox launched long after iPlayer and after I stopped watching both of the shows I mentioned (in fact, Top Gear in its 2002 incarnation was functionally off the air before Britbox launched), but the BBC sold their streaming rights to those two programs such that their modern incarnations were never, so far as I'm aware, available on Britbox.
For what it's worth, I stopped paying the license fee because of how the BBC sucked up to the Tories in the lead up to the 2019 GE. From Newsnight displaying images of Corbyn that made him look like a Soviet stooge, to Laura Kuenssberg leaking postal vote ballot information, to Alex Forsyth saying that Boris Johnson "deserves" the election.
People say that it's subject to complaints of bias from both sides of the spectrum, but I've yet to see concrete examples that compare to this on the other side.
When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
GBP is a fiat currency issued by government through government spending and destroyed by government through taxation, it does not cost the taxpayer it's at worst a bad allocation of resources or incentivization of resource allocation.
This reminded me of an article in The Economist published last year, April 2025:
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
[1] https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/04/09/zombie-politics...what a bizarre article, completely disconnected from reality. in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for more than 2 decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build HS2, that's projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world. The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
Fishing holds similar role in the UK and France (at least). Tiny components of the overall economy, giant patriotic feels.
I still think some manufacturing is simply strategic, and you should maintain a capability even at a (financial) loss though.
In the US that's farming. The "family farm" which is rare ends up being the justification for tons of agribusiness subsidies.
The good news is the USA produces lots of food.
> Fishing holds similar role in the UK
Indeed and ironically most British people refuse to eat the species commonly found in UK waters, e.g. mackerel etc.
Because the Brits are so fussy, most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
It’s only possible for Dead Man valorizing politicians to be elected because much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
> much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
Well, yes. But not many of them worship the generation who were mostly responsible for voting in favour of Brexit (60% support among those aged 65 and over at the time of the vote).
I think they do, actually. They just have a disconnect about it. But e.g. removing the triple lock is unpopular not just among those of an age to be affected by it.
This sounds good until you run out of steel and out of sellers as well
Half of all steel in the UK is imported anyway, and there are many places to obtain it. Unless the UK goes to war with most of the world at the same time, it’s not going to have trouble getting steel.
If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons.
Domestic steel production is an essential element of being sovereign, as opposed to being the handpuppet of a larger power (like the US).
> If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons.
Same with the iron we'd need to make our own steel.
And a current glut just makes it even cheaper for us to stockpile, vs spending on votes by propping up a failing industry.
I don't see how the UK could generally be self-sufficient in any large war.
It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.
Yep, same can be said of manufacturing capability in general. If you don't have a manufacturing base then inevitably when there's a war you may find yourself unable to build defense components.
You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.
The food example, is the exact reason for large farming subsidies in the European Union. These were implemented as a founding initiative, due to the experience of food shortages during the second world war. A great number of things could be considered critical. Due to the nature of when access could be cut off, the main thing countries likely worry about being able to access, is things humans need to stay alive, and things needed to wage war.
Farming subsidies are one of the most criticized parts of the EU. My comment isn't in support of it. But even so, subsidy is quite different from compulsory purchase. The question is: why is steel special. Not in a no-action-vs-some-action way, but why so aggressive?
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
Obviously there are a lot of important things you need to keep a country running, but steel is a key input a in a huge number of very important sectors (infrastructure, military, automotive etc.) so having some ability to produce your own steel seems a sensible hedge.
Food tends to be a lot easier to produce, and many countries do often subsidize their food production, as well as have mercantilistic policies to ensure food production is kept locally.
Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
Steel comes from iron, which you can't grow. It's more critical than food, which you can grow. Same for vaccines.
> Steel comes from iron, which you can't grow
Right, and where is the iron coming from in the scenario where we can't import steel?
As it is top-critical, you're recycling it, opening new mines, and taking it by force.
Don't most of these contingencies apply to steel in the first place?
Nope. The entire point here is facing the decision on which of these contingencies will apply.
Interesting how they haven't repeated in this article earlier claims that the Chinese purchase of the steelworks was a strategic move to slowly destroy the blast furnaces by letting them cool under pretext of low demand.
See also Chinese companies buying UK private schools and closing them down
Original: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/02/chinese-company-...
https://archive.is/dRQsB#selection-2155.4-2155.79
Choice quote from the article
The state intervened to stop the Chinese from sabotaging their furnaces. Seems like an open and shut case unless you have 5 eyes intelligence sources.
The government is forced to sell steel at a loss, because all the buyers for whom this is a such a vital supply would otherwise buy cheaper imported steel, every single one of them.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
2 things: a) Government plays a part in the cost of things - especially years of mis-investment around energy generation has sent British prices to the stratosphere and employment taxation levels greater than those 'cheaper' producers. b) The 'cheaper' producers are still _producers_ and thus have control - if they need to hoard their own supply they will, or if they need to leverage it for some political gain they might.
Until something happens that disrupts the supply chains from abroad and suddenly there's an issue
The same is, as far as I can grasp it, true for butter, bread, milk and eggs. Only there, it is already established.
I assume, ultimately western nations will have to adopt what already exists for agricultural goods for production as well. I am afraid it will end as a per-worker subsidy analog to per-area-of-land for lack of a better metric but in the end, that is what will be necessary if one wants to keep any industrial capabilities.
one of the most hilarious examples of how the current wh admins false protectionism, in my mind, is the crucible steel bankruptcy in jan/feb 2025.
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
One more tiny piece of the global system of international order falling apart.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
Pretty sure there's more than enough in Australia.
Iron ore yes, smelting capacity, don't know, but it's literally on the other side of the world.
One can argue whether, in abstract, this was a good idea.
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
Tangent: disturbing to see the BBC thinking they're going to get far by paywalling quasi-randomly in North America. At least right now it's trivial to ignore.
Tangent: disturbing to see many North American news sites thinking they're going to get far by region-blocking European visitors because they don't want to be GDPR compliant ;)
Disturbing? In what sense? Other news sources are paywalled and UK citizens have to pay in tax.
The annoying thing about the BBC paywall is that it is implemented by using different domains, so (for example here) people in the UK go to bbc.com instead of bbc.co.uk
Wait what? Is the NYT not paywalled somewhere?
I'm not seeing this particular paywall, but disturbing in that the BBC is so awful and stupid at this, presumably.
For many years I would have gladly paid the BBC $20/mo for some way to legally watch Top Gear and Doctor Who. That's it, just two shows and I'll give you more than I give Netflix. They never offered a single legal mechanism available to US citizens, so, well.....don't admit to crimes on the internet and all that.
It was offered much later than iPlayer was for the UK, but to claim they 'never' had an option for US audiences is false when they have had Britbox for almost 10 years
Not only was Britbox launched long after iPlayer and after I stopped watching both of the shows I mentioned (in fact, Top Gear in its 2002 incarnation was functionally off the air before Britbox launched), but the BBC sold their streaming rights to those two programs such that their modern incarnations were never, so far as I'm aware, available on Britbox.
Have you tried BritBox? It seems to show Doctor Who, but ironically, being in the UK I'm unable to access their site to see specific details.
An increasing proportion of UK citizens are deciding not to pay for a TV licence that funds the BBC as consumption patterns have changed.
The BBC will be a zombie in 10 years unless they stop being emotionally driven and sort out their funding.
Good. The BBC is no longer the shining beacon of objective reporting it once was. Let it die and be replaced by something better.
Presumably you get your news content from Rupert Murdoch, the Daily Mail and UK News?
For what it's worth, I stopped paying the license fee because of how the BBC sucked up to the Tories in the lead up to the 2019 GE. From Newsnight displaying images of Corbyn that made him look like a Soviet stooge, to Laura Kuenssberg leaking postal vote ballot information, to Alex Forsyth saying that Boris Johnson "deserves" the election.
People say that it's subject to complaints of bias from both sides of the spectrum, but I've yet to see concrete examples that compare to this on the other side.
> how the BBC sucked up to the Tories in the lead up to the 2019 GE
> Laura Kuenssberg
ughh yes so glad that era is behind us. Good riddance.
If everybody thinks you’re biased, you’re probably not biased at all.
Look at how the BBC reports on the Middle East and tell me you agree with it.
> In March, the National Audit Office released a report noting that the Scunthorpe steelworks was costing the government about £1.3m a day.
No, BBC, the government doesn't have money. It costs the net taxpayer that much a day.
When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
GBP is a fiat currency issued by government through government spending and destroyed by government through taxation, it does not cost the taxpayer it's at worst a bad allocation of resources or incentivization of resource allocation.