China Accused of Attempting to Sabotage UK’s Final Primary Steel Mill as London Enacts Emergency Nationalisation

Accusations of sabotage swirl over the fate of Britain’s final primary steel plant, yet Beijing warns London against “turning economic and trade cooperation into political and security issues”.

Employees at British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant, the final crumbs of a once-enormous national industry, expressed fear of sabotage by its Chinese owners to force it to close, as the UK government nationalised the plant with apparently just hours to spare.

The Jingye Group is alleged to have deliberately cancelled orders for the materials needed to keep the blast furnaces operating. When shut down, the process is difficult and expensive to restart as the molten metal solidifies inside.

The government said Monday it had secured enough materials to keep the furnaces hot in the coming days, that these had been paid for, and that they would be delivered.

GMB trade union general secretary Gary Smith said steel workers had blockaded the plant to its likely outgoing Chinese owners as the plant was nationalised amid concerns about a last-ditch attempt to damage it. He said, states The Guardian: “We were worried about industrial vandalism and there was a worry about sabotage on the site, quite frankly… yesterday, workers did prevent executives from the Chinese owners from going on site.”
“I’m sure that people are still very worried about that, but these people performed heroics yesterday to ensure that we’ve got a fighting chance for the steel industry in this country. They were legitimately concerned about industrial sabotage.”

GB News reports that at the weekend, a group of “six to eight” Chinese executives managed to get into the steel plant despite having had their security access revoked and locked themselves inside a room before having the police called on them.

Conservative Member of Parliament Sir Christopher Chope asserted, reports The Times, that the bid to force the end of British Steel by its Chinese owner was motivated by their building of a new steel plant in China and, thus, they wanted to create a dependent market for it.

He is reported to have said: “They’re building a new steel production facility in China, and what they wanted to do was to use that production facility to supply the UK market. And indeed, this was an attempt at what I think is best described as industrial sabotage.”

Brexit’s Nigel Farage struck a similar chord, saying he is “100 per cent certain” that China bought British Steel to destroy it.

The government has said it was negotiating with Jingye but had concluded the Chinese group were determined to close the furnaces no matter what. Remarkably, the paper reported Monday:

Government insiders believe that steps taken by Jingye, the Chinese owner of British Steel, were intended to stop Britain producing its own virgin steel and force it to rely on imports from China. The steps included refusing to order new raw materials, selling the materials it had and rejecting offers from ministers to help stem losses at the Scunthorpe plant.

Nevertheless, the government has not gone so far as to accuse Jingye Group of attempted sabotage and insists it does not consider China a “hostile state” unsuitable for involvement in critical, security-critical industry.

The Chinese government, for its part, has adopted a lecturing tone against the United Kingdom’s left-wing government for nationalising the plant. Beijing spokesman Lin Jian told Britain on Monday that he expects the UK to “treat Chinese companies investing and operating in the UK in a fair and just manner, protect their legitimate rights and interests.”

He said the United Kingdom should “refrain from turning economic and trade cooperation into political and security issues lest it should undermine the confidence of Chinese companies in their normal investment and operation in the UK.”

Steel production in the United Kingdom, once a world-leading and dominant national industry, has now all but disappeared, and several factors stand against any revival, even in an age of backsliding on globalism and reshoring, as led by the United States.

In addition to steel dumping, the British government itself actively disadvantages home production, for instance, through green agenda policies that drive up the cost of energy, severely hampering the energy-intensive process of making steel.

The United Kingdom has the most expensive electricity in the world, and the government has banned coal mining altogether, meaning coal for the steel blast furnace has to be imported by ships from abroad.