Extremely odd things are happening all over just now and perhaps we are becoming inured to disturbing novelty. In the UK, some might date this to 2015 and the rise of Corbyn, passing through Brexit, in an ever-rising, ever-accelerating crescendo of covid, Ukraine and now the daily lunacies of Trump.
Personally, however, I have rarely been more shocked than when I read this today:
Emergency legislation allowing the government to instruct companies to keep loss-making steel operations in England open, or face criminal penalties for their executives, were passed yesterday during an extraordinary sitting of parliament.
For context: I bow to no man on the strategic imperative of being able to make steel in this country. (Obviously, not everyone need agree.) Nor do I object to swift and decisive use of the levers of power: in fact, more often I am criticising the inertia and lack of imagination of those who hold those levers limply in their idle hands.
And I don't have the time to read up on the exact legislation in full, which may, I suppose, in the round be less shocking than the above summary suggests.
But ... criminal penalties? For an economic "offence"? Obviously, there are such liabilities upon employers that flout health and safety regulations. But financial affairs are intrinsically civil matters: are there any other even vaguely equivalent precedents? The "personal liability" precedent that came immediately to mind to this former councillor was Thatcher's legislation on local authorities: to prevent rogue "socialist" councils like Lambeth and Liverpool from taking the piss at annual budget time, she made the chief finance officer personally liable for balancing the budget, with powers granted to the said official to impose balance if the democratically elected members persisted in mulishly voting for infeasible financial plans. But these were not criminal matters. Is Starmer proposing to bang up Chinese nationals ..? Who was it that thought a sober grey lawyer would at least bring stable, rule-of-law government to the land?
Legislate in haste, repent at leisure. In the wrong hands this precedent will be a joy to every mad leftist and green in the land. You pick a piece of policy, and declare it a criminal offence to carry out any act inconvenient for said policy, property rights be damned. What am I bid for failure to install heat pumps? "Well, climate change threatens the well-being of everyone on the planet, it's preventing genocide we are talking about here! It's obviously a criminal matter!!" You can generate further nightmares for yourself. Or indeed, generate a few prime candidates of your own for criminalisation! It needn't only be leftists that play the game: we can all join in, see how they like that. We are constrained only by the limitations of our imagination.
Am I alone in my state of shock at all this? Or do I just need to read the whole thing properly, and calm down?
ND
24 comments:
Why would a UK owned company want to do steel here then? At least foreign ones can wind up the business, and then just avoid the UK.
Surely it'd be better to have legislation that loss making steel can be handed over to the UK, and must be as an alternative to simply closing it down? Here's the keys guv, best of luck, see you around?
And speaking of Trump, who would have had Carney down as the one to neuter him?
A bad week for Trump, first Carney forces him to pause his tariffs, then Apple convinces him to take tech off the tariffed items.
Whilst the various organs of the US State mostly leave him to it, and China are more interested in saving face, it's left to America's hat and the private sector to trim his excesses.
Squirmer has just provided China with a casus belli.
What a moron.
Um - seems many do not know or have forgotten that there is NOBODY in the Cabinet that has any business experience whatsoever. Add to that the Starmer is not right in the head - I am convinced he is personality disordered - so why this utter insanity surprises ANYONE beats me.
What will be left of the UK when they are gone won't be a lot.
Maybe he's schizophrenic - after all, compare his reaction to the Sumy attack to any of the many strikes on Gaza.
It does seem odd, but then Starmer shouldn't be starting from here. He's suddenly realised that we can't make military-grade steel once blast furnaces are gone - where was he when Port Talbot was closing?
This is all down to the UKs appallingly high energy prices. As Terrifying Tim from Tullett told us back in 2013, the economy is an energy construct - by which token UK production is well up the creek. Wasn't it only a few weeks ago Labour put the tin lid on the Whitehaven coking coal mine?
In student days I used to explain to the hard of understanding that the Nazi's economic policies were indeed socialist, but a more intelligent sort of socialism than the Labour Party's or the Bolsheviks'.
The Nazis had realised that it would be enough to control the firms - there was no need to go through the paradiddle of nationalising them, or indeed of tossing the management into the blast furnaces.
And here we are: the great helmsman, Sir Steir Badly, has decided on a Nazi solution. Well done, that man.
The Act (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0221/240221.pdf) does have quite a high bar for any criminality, offering a chance to provide a “reasonable excuse”. A court determines the reasonableness (or not), not the government. I can guarantee you that no one will ever be convicted under this legislation (it is to act as a stiff deterrent against sabotage and blatant malfeasance.
What is striking though is the lack of trust among those in power about Chinese business, erm “ethics”.
“… the economy is an energy construct”
If that were the case, Venezuela, with the highest oil reserves in the world, would be as rich as Croesus. Since it, cough, isn’t, there may be a little more to it than that.
There's an interesting book, "Poorly Made In China", by a fluent Mandarin-speaker who's a go-between twixt the US market and Chinese manufacturers. They will cut corners and costs, and not tell you BUT ... this will not apply where the State has an interest in the venture's success e.g. Apple or Tesla. Anyone cutting corners there to keep something for themselves will be punished, perhaps terminally, if caught. I would very much imagine this also applies to military procurement. Don't think it's like pre-SMO Russia or Ukraine.
If we can make our own steel won't an enemy just deny us iron ore and coking coal? Or are we to keep ten year stocks of each?
We have coking coal on the Coast to Coast path, just outside Whitehaven - I walked past the mine in 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/04/mining-firm-withdraws-plan-for-uks-first-deep-coalmine-in-30-years
"The Whitehaven mine was ruled unlawful in September, with the judge agreeing with Friends of the Earth, which brought the judicial review. They had argued that Michael Gove, when he was secretary of state for levelling up, acted unlawfully in accepting a claim by West Cumbria Mining that the mine would be net zero and have no impact on the UK’s ability to meet the emissions cuts required under the Climate Change Act 2008. "
https://edconway.substack.com/p/the-strange-unsettling-story-of-british
"Why the fate of a blast furnace in Scunthorpe might have much deeper implications for this country"
Coal, coal coal...
https://euracoal.eu/library/archive/united-kingdom-6/
"The UK has identified hard coal resources of 3 560 million tonnes, although total resources could be as large as 187 billion tonnes. About 80 million tonnes of the economically recoverable reserves are available in shallow deposits capable of being extracted by surface mining. There are also about 1 000 million tonnes of lignite resources, mainly in Northern Ireland, although no lignite is mined at present."
I guess the plan is to put the economy and population in the same state as Russia was when it all fell down.
I'm sorry, but were Starmer to drop dead he'd have done us the only favour he ever will do.
Exactly, we don't have any coking coal. For obvious reasons any coking coal that you are not allowed to mine is coking coal you don't have.
If you are not allowed to do open cast mining then those deposits are not reserves.
And anyway, if it's stream coal it's no bloody use for the bast furnace coke ovens anyway.
May I take it that the blethering about coal is intended to disguise the fact that the blast furnaces need imported iron ore and therefore couldn't provide us with an autarkic economy in steel?
To be fair to Starmer, not something I enjoy, pretty much all of this nagombi was authored by Blair/Brown, and enhanced by Cameron and Johnson.
Underrated point.
An autarchic economy in ANYTHING bar, ironically enough, coal, would be hard to organise, we only produce enough food for half the population and are busily paving over our most productive land like the Vale of Evesham.
But we COULD get iron ore here, it's just much more expensive (i.e. poor quality) than stuff the Aussies can mine with huge diggers.
The assumption is I guess that sea lanes would still be open. In case of major non-nuclear conflict, would that really be the case with satellite surveillance and modern missiles? Houthis aren't doing too bad sans satellites.
At that point people start taking out satellites, near earth orbits become filled with junk, and we enter a new Dark Age.
Property value is determined by the limits applied to what you can do with it. The unfettered ability to do what you want with it clearly has the maximum value. For example, land that was open to any development with recourse to planning would be worth significantly more than that which is designated green belt (or ancient woodland etc).
Now, all rights are enforced by the state (contract law and ultimately via force) so you can't ever disconnect those rights from the state and the meddling of politicians.
However, we are seeing a large increase in the interference of the state in what individuals can do (free speech being another example) with the consequence of making those rights less valuable.
Whilst the imbeciles in parliament are probably congratulating themselves on a clever bill the long term effect will be to make the country less well off. But why would they care - they'll be in the House of Lords or some third sector junket continuing to feed of the taxpayer teat insulated from the effects of their stupidity.
Matt said...
However, we are seeing a large increase in the interference of the state in what individuals can do (free speech being another example) with the consequence of making those rights less valuable.
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Yup. Indeed, Starmer was clear that he intended the state to control our lives (and there was I thinking it was there to serve US. Whoops)
Two months after the election, this
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/24/state-will-take-back-control-of-peoples-lives-says-starmer/
And one of my favourite "new" correspondents, on the state we are in - as opposed to that of Hungary - where I would have been before Starmer (seeing him coming) were I 21 and not 73 with Grandkids
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-happened-to-me-in-hungary?r=6g7nl
The only real question this brings up for me - when does the trouble start, as what is now happening is unbearable.
"But we COULD get iron ore here, it's just much more expensive (i.e. poor quality)"
There you are then, we must learn from Chairman Mao - every man a wee furnace in his back garden. That went well, didn't it?
Thought Coke ovens had been shut down and coke being imported???
Unlike the blast furnaces, there's nothing much fundamental stopping you running the coking ovens back up if you wanted to. That said, Scunnys coking ovens were pretty goosed when I was contracting there the next part of 10 years ago, and I'm fairly sure they finally killed them this year as the alternative to spending money on a well overdue refurb.
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