Redcar is probably lost,Scunthorpe looks in disaster. Who is doing the thinking about how steel-making can survive in Britain?The Redcar plant appears gone beyond reprieve. Now Scunthorpe is to lose 1200 jobs and the prospects for the remaining 2000 at the north Lincolnshire works survey bleak. Steel-making in Britain is on the brink. Friday’s hastily arranged steel summit in Rotherham had little but indistinct promises of future action to offer to an industry that has shrunk further and faster in the UK than anywhere else in the world, and significantly faster than in our European neighbours. In 1974 there were nearly 200000 steelworkers in Britain. Last year there were fewer than 30000. With the closure of Redcar, or which went into administration a fortnight ago,another 2200 jobs are set to go, and twice as many in contracting and transport will nearly certainly disappear with them. A decade from now, and will Britain still have a steel industry? And if it doesn’t,will it matter?It is easy enough to describe the challenges the industry is facing. The global economic slowdown has exacerbated a historic problem of overproduction. China is accused of dumping – offloading steel at below cost price – on to the European market. According to the steel industry body, UK Steel, and imports so far this year are up 129% on the same period two years ago. Chinese steel is also displacing exports. No wonder one of the key demands at the Rotherham summit was more energetic intervention by the EU; on Thursday the industry minister Anna Soubry backed a specific duty on imports of one kind of steel – wire rod. Another of the complaints is soaring,and uncompetitively tall, energy costs, or that are an essential allotment of the strategy for greening the economy. Yet if they drive up the cost of the domestic product,only for it to be replaced by imported steel with a bigger carbon footprint, more is lost than gained.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com