Steel, Sovereignty and Sabotage: How Net Zero Killed British Industry

Britain just became the only G7 nation that can’t make its own steel. Net Zero did that.

While Starmer’s Stormtroopers stand gormlessly at the despatch box mouthing platitudes about “economic resilience” and “green jobs of the future”, the truth is far simpler and far grimmer: Britain has just become the only G7 country that can no longer make its own steel. Let that sink in.

The furnaces are going cold in Scunthorpe. Port Talbot’s on life support. And MPs are now scurrying around Westminster debating whether to nationalise British Steel – a policy stolen from Reform UK, who were actually ridiculed for daring to suggest its necessity.

Some have accused Reform of a dalliance into the socialist sphere, I see it as a robust defence of the sovereignty sphere. Without our own key industries, we are powerless in age of great global volatility. We ought to put British interests first.

From Industrial Might to National Blight

Steelmaking is not just another job sector. It’s the bedrock of industrial power, the backbone of military strength, and a red-blooded symbol of sovereignty. You can’t build tanks or warships out of woke ideology and virtue-signalling wind farms. But try telling that to Ed Miliband, the architect of Britain’s Net Zero suicide note.

As Professor Gwythian Prins lays out in a powerful essay for Net Zero Watch, this isn’t just a failure of economics – it’s a failure of strategic thinking. We’re handing over our ability to build and defend our own country to China. The same China that’s building a navy faster than we can build a dinghy. The same China that burns more coal in a day than we do in a year – while we shut down power stations and pray to the gods of wind and solar.

Net Zero Zealotry: The Religion That Wrecked Britain

Let’s be clear: the closure of blast furnaces isn’t about “saving the planet”. It’s about ideological delusion. Replacing our virgin steel with recycled electric arc furnace production won’t reduce global emissions – it just shifts the CO₂ footprint to foreign ships burning heavy fuel oil as they ferry Chinese steel into Tilbury docks. All for a more inferior product.

According to Catherine McBride, who recently served as a member of the UK's Trade and Agriculture Commission, Britain’s economic analysis shows the obvious: British steel isn’t unviable – it’s being suffocated. High-energy prices, caused by insane Net Zero targets, make it unaffordable to produce anything here. Meanwhile, India and China are laughing all the way to the bank – and Beijing doesn’t lose sleep over Greta’s feelings.

Strategic Suicide by Subsidy

We’re bunging half a billion quid to Tata Steel to build arc furnaces that still won’t give us full-spectrum steelmaking capability. It’s like paying someone to smash up your car and hand you back the rear-view mirror.

This isn’t a plan. It’s capitulation.

The strategic insanity here is breathtaking. How do we rebuild our Navy – our actual defence – if we can’t smelt the steel? What do we do when the next war comes (and it’s coming), and we find our supply chains run through Beijing and Islamabad?

It’s not hyperbole – it’s history repeating. A country that cannot make steel cannot make warships. And a country that cannot make warships is not a serious country.

Time to Rip Up the Green Book of Fairytales

The unions – yes, the unions who seem more keen about a focus on diversity and inclusion in the workplace these days than defending said workers–they get it. They’ve called this policy out for what it is: a net-zero charade that makes no environmental sense, no economic sense, and certainly no strategic sense. France and Germany aren’t ditching their Basic Oxygen Steelmaking plants. Neither is the US. They’ve got governments that still believe in nations.

We must rip the green blinkers off and start from reality: secure the grid, reopen domestic coal mines, we have seen examples in which open cast coal mines have been harnessed and restored leaving the environment better than before the mining began, build real energy resilience with advanced clean coal technology, and yes – restart British steel from our coal, our ore, and our hands.

The music has stopped, as Professor Prins rightly says. And if Westminster doesn’t hear that silence – the silence of furnaces extinguished, of livelihoods lost, of a nation sleepwalking into strategic servitude – then they’ve no business pretending to govern.

Scunthorpe Didn’t Fail – Britain Did

This is not the fault of Scunthorpe. It’s the fault of a political class obsessed with Net Zero delusions, utterly disconnected from the grim realities of war, industry, and national survival.

The closure of Britain’s last blast furnaces is not just about steel. It is about whether this country wants to exist as a sovereign industrial nation – or whether we’re content to become a sentimental tourist theme park, flogging fish and chips to foreign visitors while China builds the warships we can’t.

It’s time to choose.