Sir Keir’s Steel Revival: Strategic for industry or just a symbolic gesture?

Sir Keir Starmer is making plans for their future in British Steel. That's British Steel, courtesy of China, and now critically endangered, as are all Nigels.

Nobody calls their baby Nigel any more. There is, of course, Nigel Farage. That might explain a lot. Since 2015, there have been only 28 Nigels born in the UK, and none at all in 2020.

If you're a bit lost, I'm referencing the post-punk XTC song about Nigel and his parents' wish for him to enjoy a future in British Steel. When it was released back in 1979 British Steel responded by rounding up a lot of Sheffield steelworkers called Nigel and getting them to say their jobs were actually great.

The steelworkers' union was also interested in the hit number as a potential workers' anthem, until songwriter Colin Moulding told a union official that Nigel was from the management side. The union immediately lost interest.

The song came out at a time when there really did seem to be a future in British Steel, and there were still a lot of Nigels about. Normans too. That's another baby name which has taken a dive in the 21st century.

Sir Keir has brought back that 1970s vibe by wading in to prop up a strategic industry, just like they used to do in the old days.

Well, I say strategic, and with a name like British Steel we should all be proud of the Scunthorpe works, but it does churn out greenhouse gases, and steelmaking in Britain has shrunk so much that today our output is less than that of Belgium.

The UK produces 0.3 per cent of global output. The EU produces seven per cent, so when Sir Keir achieves his ambition of rejoining the EU, we'll have no problem importing all we need. 

The government machinations to seize control of Scunthorpe from the Chinese have been wonderful political performance art.

There was that emergency recall of Parliament on a Saturday, something previously done when Britain was at war, stressing the urgency of the situation and making a crisis out of a drama.

Sir Keir Starmer - Saviour of Scunthorpe! Sir Keir Starmer Takes Back Control! (he has stolen that phrase from Brexit).

He's one for the Churchillian grand gesture, whether it's offering to send troops to Ukraine, or seizing a foreign-owned steelworks.

There was then the cliffhanger tension of whether raw materials would arrive in time to keep the blast furnaces going. What a shame Britain doesn't have a coal mine somewhere not too far away, like Cumbria, for instance, which could supply the steel works instead of relying on imports.

How did this all come to pass? Where do we go from here? What would Maggie Thatcher think?

It's only a guess, but she might think that Scunthorpe was a loss-making plant which should be allowed to die, as that is what happened in the 1980s when she left such matters to market forces.

The upshot was a resetting of British industry, involving a lot of economic euthanasia. In came a wave of foreign investment, and the UK repositioned itself with more emphasis on service industries and finance. 

As for Scunthorpe, the direction of travel is for it to be nationalised, but keep that under your hat because if our EU friends and erstwhile partners find out they might get in a bit of a tizzy, given their views on state aid. 

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The Prison Officers' Association has said that the attack by Hashem Abedi which injured three prison officers demonstrates the dangers brave prison officers face on a daily basis. It also demonstrates that prison officers face a new and growing danger from a core of prisoners serving extremely long, or whole life, sentences, who feel that they have literally nothing to lose.

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Oxford University is proposing to make the Latin wording of its 800-year-old graduation ceremony "gender neutral" to accommodate non-binary students.

If Latin is a dead language, this is surely a case of interfering with the dead.

But why stop at Latin? French next - it would become much easier to learn. Is it un table or une table?