Back in November 2024, Britain’s eco zealot Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband banned new coal mines to send a “clear signal” to the world. But now, with officials scrambling to buy millions of pounds of foreign coal with taxpayer cash just to keep the country’s last primary steel manufacturer running, it seems the real message Britain has sent is how chaotic Europe’s push for Net Zero has become.
Parliament passed emergency legislation on Saturday, giving ministers control of British Steel following concerns that its Chinese owner, Jingye, was preparing to shut its unprofitable furnaces in Scunthorpe. This would have left Britain—as Bloomberg pointed out, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—as the only Group of Seven nation without primary steel-making operations.
Writing in The Times, Jim Armitage noted that this and other crises in what remains of Britain’s industrial sector “all trace back to that one factor: the high price of British electricity.”
By killing off cheap, coal-fired electricity generation, successive governments focused on meeting net-zero emissions targets have crippled energy-intensive manufacturers.
Further proof, if ever it was needed, that Europe cannot go ‘green’ and ‘go for growth’ at the same time.
Indeed, in the hope of saving the steelworks in Scunthorpe, ministers spent the weekend offering to buy thousands of tons of coking coal shipped all the way from Japan at taxpayer expense, resulting—of course—in increased CO2 emissions.
Tory MP Neil O’Brien said it was “totally mad that just a few months ago Ed Miliband banned coal and coke production in the UK and boasted about sending a signal to the world, yet now the government are going round the world with a begging bowl trying to get enough coal to keep the last blast furnaces going.”
Although his own Conservative Party’s record is not much better on this front.
If the government is not able to source materials, such as coking coal, soon enough, the furnaces could cool, causing serious damage to the machinery. Officials say a confirmed shipment will arrive “in the coming days,” though voters are bound to be less confident.
