Emergency law passed to force loss-making steel companies to keep operating
Emergency law passed to force loss-making steel companies to keep operating
If they're so critical, why aren't they nationalised and their profits used to weather downturns — instead of privatised profits and socialised losses?
Oh, that's right! Because we live in corporate dictatorships masquerading as "freedom" and "democracy".
Mainly because they are unprofitable edit: typo reversed my meaning.
The gov is considering nationalisation but to keep the active ability in the UK not for prifit. It was announced this morning that the plant would likely have to run at a loss.
I agree we should nationalize it. And if we are losing money anyway. Use the steel for most gov projects etc.
But parliment is not considering it practicle for us to sell steel at a compeitive rate to china amd other cheap labour nations.
And as of now. Even the quality is not likely to be a huge selling point. As china etc are very able to make quality steel now.
Not who you responded to, but from the article:
“Blast furnaces in the UK have been loss-making for the better part of a decade and been economically unviable due to competition from Chinese and Indian blast furnaces, along with rising energy costs in the UK.”
Which makes me think there isn't much profit to be had even for business, I imagine China invested with the long term plan of effectively cornering the UK market and eventually shutting the plant down, increasing our reliance on Chinese steel.
And was the loss of money from the plant British money, or Chinese?
Either way, I am also in agreement that it should be nationalised.
This plant makes a loss of £700,000 per day. The one in Port Talbot makes a loss of £1,700,000 per day. That’s why their owners want them closed. There’s no market for British steel. It isn’t the Dutch high-grade steel which is needed for, among other things, building warships, and it isn’t cheap like the steel made in China. It’s nowhere.
About time but not far enough. We sold British Steel for a quid and it is loss making, so we should give them a quid for it.
The recall of parliament from its Easter recess, only the sixth Saturday sitting since the second world war, was ordered after negotiations with British Steel’s Chinese owners, Jingye, appeared to break down.
Opening Saturday’s debate, Reynolds said the government had been in talks with Jingye since it came to power last July and had offered “substantial” support. Most recently, Labour had offered to purchase the necessary raw materials for the blast furnaces, the last primary virgin steel-making facilities in the UK, but this had been met with a counter offer from Jingye demanding “an excessive amount” of support.
Reynolds continued: “Over the last few days, it became clear that the intention of Jingye was to refuse to purchase sufficient raw material to keep the blast furnaces running; in fact, their intention was to cancel and refuse to pay for existing orders. The company would therefore have irrevocably and unilaterally closed down primary steelmaking at British Steel.
So they were trying to shut down a critical piece of steel production for the UK, no doubt to then try and get us to purchase steel from China instead. Can see the seriousness of the situation in regards to recalling parliament to renationalise the plant.