The steel works in Scunthorpe were in the news this week as the plant is threatened with closure and the Labour government is in talks with Jingye, the Chinese owners of British Steel in an attempt to keep the plant’s two blast furnaces running and save the jobs at the steel mill. Jingye had said in March that keeping the blast furnaces going was no longer financially viable as the company is running short of the raw materials needed to keep them operational. UK Government ministers were expected to make a formal offer on Thursday to Jingye executives, for a deal which would provide taxpayer funding for the purchase of raw materials such as iron ore and coking coal for the blast furnaces in the company’s Scunthorpe plant.
The deal is a short term stop-gap aimed at keeping the steel plant open while discussions continue about its long-term future. However Jingye has already turned down an offer from the UK Government of £500 million of public money to help convert the furnaces to electric operation, a rejection which has dampened hopes that Jingye will agree to this latest deal.
The Labour government is coming under increasing pressure to renationalise British Steel should the talks on its long term future fail to save the company. British Steel was formerly in public ownership but was privatised in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher, leading to the loss of many thousands of jobs and the closure of the company’s Ravenscraig and Gartcosh plants which devastated working-class communities in Lanarkshire and brought about the end of steel manufacturing in Scotland.
No one least of all me, is going to begrudge the efforts made to keep the steel mill open and to save the 3000 jobs which depend on the mill, such efforts are precisely what the government ought to be doing. This leads me to the point of this blog piece, if the Labour government is willing to go to these lengths in order to save steel making in Scunthorpe, why is it not willing to go to similar lengths to save the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland?
Back in February, Labour’s Scottish branch manager, who had campaigned in the run up to the Westminster general election on a platform of Vote Labour to save the jobs at Grangemouth, told STV’s Colin Mackay on the day after redundancy notices had gone out to hundreds of Grangemouth workers that the Labour government could not in fact save the jobs at Grangemouth because the plant is privately owned.
During a debate in June last year, ahead of the Westminster General Election, Sarwar said that a Labour government “would step in and put our money where our mouth is and invest … and step in to save the jobs at the refinery”.
During that debate Sarwar also said, “Read my lips, no austerity under Labour,” and to the surprise of absolutely no one by now, that was a lie as well.
So the Labour government was unable to step in and save the jobs at Grangemouth because it’s run and owned by a private company, information that apparently was unavailable to Anas Sarwar when he vowed before the general election that a Labour government would step in and save the jobs at the refinery, but the fact that the British Steel plant in Scunthorpe is run and owned by a private company is no barrier to the Labour government stepping in to save the jobs there.
There are now calls for the UK government to renationalise British Steel, something which is supposedly impossible for it to do with Grangemouth, on account of it being too socialist for Keir Starmer.
Last month Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, in whose constituency the refinery sits, accused Anas Sarwar of being very quiet on the issue of saving the Grangemouth jobs. In an interview with Holyrood magazine he said: He’s [Sarwar] been very quiet on the issue.
“I’ve been down here and for eight months I have been trying to push it to the top of the agenda. I have managed to move the party a bit on it. But do I think we’ve done enough? No.”
Asked if he felt alone in his his fight to save the complex, he said he doesn’t want to speak about his colleagues and that they have “their own constituencies, campaigns and fights.” So that would be a Yes, then.
This is all very different from the government’s efforts to save Scunthorpe. Earlier this week the BBC reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has sought to reassure workers at the Lincolnshire plant that the government would consider nationalisation if necessary. Nationalisation was never on the table for Grangemouth, yet it too is a strategically vital industry. The Labour government’s promised £200 million investment in Grangemouth is now also in doubt.
So why the difference? The bottom line is that Scottish jobs and Scottish votes are simply not as important to a British government as jobs and votes in England. The closure of Scunthorpe and the loss of its jobs risks giving a political boost to the far right vultures of Nigel Farage, who are already circling around a Labour party that has shot itself in both feet. The closure of Grangemouth and the loss of its jobs is politically far less of a threat to Starmer. Labour MPs from Scotland only make a difference to the electoral arithmetic of the Commons when the parties are fairly evenly balanced in England.
There is also the consideration, which has no doubt not escaped the right wing British flag waving ghouls who have captured the Labour party, that the loss of an important piece of Scottish industrial infrastructure merely gives the UK Government more leverage in a future Scottish independence referendum campaign. Oh no Scotland, you can’t become independent, not when you rely on England for all your petrol and diesel.
Grangemouth has been abandoned by this Labour government, there’s no guarantee that Scunthorpe will be saved, but if Starmer and his cronies had put even half the effort and public money into saving Grangemouth as they have with Scunthorpe, Scotland might have been able to keep Grangemouth open.
Remaining a part of this so-called union keeps Scotland second class politically and economically.The difference in the Labour government’s responses to the threats to Scunthorpe and Grangemouth make that starkly apparent. We’re being taken for mugs and fobbed off with intelligence insulting excuses.
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