As government gathers tomorrow to save British Steel, Scunthorpe – is there a far deeper problem lurking?

When it comes to matters of faith there’s an increasing perception that contemporary legislators may love to acknowledge and celebrate some religious festivals, but not others. In particular, diversity and inclusion theology seems to demand that the country is systematically pushed away from the Christian landscape that has dominated it for the past two millennia in favour of the acknowledgement and adoption of other more recently imported religious practices and observances.

That said, at least the Westminster calendar still clings for now to long-established traditions, which is why on Wednesday the House of Commons shut down for one of its lengthiest annual breaks, and legislators headed home to join their constituents in the lengthy and profound preparations for the Easter Tridiuum.

At least that was until this morning, when they heard they’ll going to have to interrupt their Palm Sunday weekend of prayer to troll back to Westminster for a one-day commando raid on the ailing British Steel plant in Scunthorpe. As one senior Westminster source quipped this afternoon, Keir Starmer is looking for a ‘one day only’ debate after which he expects legislators to agree to take the steelworks into government control, following threats from its Chinese owners Jingye to close the plant. According to Jingye the blast furnaces are “no longer viable” and the site is suffering financial losses of at least £700,000 a day.

A mandatory 45-day consultation on plans to shed jobs began last month – fluctuating global market conditions were blamed, but there were grumbles also from the Chinese owners about the high costs associated with meeting the UK government’s low carbon production demands.

For its part the UK steel industry has warned that ending production at Scunthorpe, which employs 2,700 people, would see the UK lose vital steelmaking capabilities in a sector that has already been pretty much obliterated.

Much of the bluster going round political circles this week was of the need for the government to take an urgent interventionist approach to “secure the future of British Steel.” Sadly failing to secure the future of British Steel has been a profound incompetence that has underscored British industrial decline for absolute decades. Much like the loss of coal and other prime manufacturing processes, the failure to recognise and protect our nation’s ability to provide at home for its own core needs has not only weakened Britain substantially, but has occasioned a dreadful and devastating toll on communities, workers and families across the UK from which entire generations have never recovered.

In the light of this one can’t help but wonder exactly what Keir Starmer and his Labour Party will do with the Scunthorpe steelworks if they do vote to grab it back from the Chinese. No doubt tomorrow’s debate will conclude that British steelmaking still has a bright and prosperous future, but will need to operate differently, more competitively and the transition to UK ownership will not be possible without painful decisions being made. If this sounds a lot like the preamble to last year’s Port Talbot steelworks disaster, it’s actually highly likely that the Port Talbot strategy is already fully prepped and waiting at the back of the Scunthorpe portfolio.

When the Indian firm Tata Steel pulled out of South Wales last year complaining about unsustainable losses, the shutting down of the old Port Talbot blast furnaces saw more than 2,000 made redundant directly, and many thousands more affected, as the newer electric arc furnaces require fewer workers to keep them running – though ironically they aren’t able to make the high grade virgin steel that Port Talbot was long famous for.

No doubt some of the urgency surrounding tomorrow’s debate will be motivated by a new desire to detach Chinese corporations from control of British based manufacturing, especially in the wake of the global turmoil that has been created by Donald Trump’s tariff machinations, but frankly it’s hard to see how the Scunthorpe plant can magically become viable when so much of the British steel industry and its interdendent infrastructure has already been systematically dismantled and obliteratred.

Like any heavy industry that dominates a locality as one of its primary employers, It’s hard to describe or measure the impact that the loss of so many well-paid, stable jobs will make to the local economy in and around Scunthorpe, but countless lives and families will be decimated, some never to recover. Most of those likely to affected adversely will be loyal, long-term employees with skills unique to the steel industry, who cannot easily move to other trades, and whose ages means that they will most likely thrown on the employment scrap heap. In Port Talbot the town is already just a mere shadow of its former self, when it employed some 20,000 local people and pumped many hundreds of millions of pounds a year into the UK economy.

If Scunthorpe is destined to follow the same trajectory as Port Talbot, no doubt there will be much said tomorrow about the apparent failure of its Chinese owners to invest seriously in the plant. Mention will also be made of their saturation of the global steel markets with their own home-manufactured steel that has allegedly undermined the value of the British product.

This is all quite plausible but actually there’s a far deeper problem lurking here, though in a particular way it does still relate to the Chinese. It’s what theologians like to call ‘the China dilemma’, and it goes something like this …

Steels are alloys of iron and other elements, primarily carbon, widely used in construction and other applications because of their high tensile strengths and low costs. As such steel is a vital component of most aspects of modern construction and consumables.

Now, there may be a lot of iron ore buried in our planet but it’s still a finite resource, as are the other elements that give us that precious steel. So, however deep we dig, however hard we work, there’s only so much steel to be had from planet earth, and we’re using it ever more rapidly. Until now it’s been the developed western hemisphere that has benefited from this, immersed as we are in decadent lifestyles.

Which is where the ‘China dilemma’ comes in. Once a strictly rural, low maintenance, low demand nation, in recent decades China has embarked on an understandable dash towards western modernisation, chucking millions of families off their smallholdings and into new urban environments built around consumer demands. In short, every Chinese family is suddenly demanding a fridge, a TV, a washing machine, a car, and so on.

Perfectly reasonable, you might say, and that’s before we start talking about the two or three cars that most westerners run, and all the other consumables we apparently can’t live without. And then you can add in all the other developing nations, who have exactly the same right to enjoy those excesses we take so much for granted.

The dilemma is simply that there aren’t enough raw materials on the planet to provide for all this so, sooner rather than later, we’re all going to be faced with stark choices – have less so that others can have more, or tell developing nations that they simply aren’t going to get what we have, with all the unimaginable consequences that could have for global stability.

Way ahead of us in this, the Chinese in particular recognised that their situation actually gives them immense purchasing power, so they’ve pre-empted shortages by doing a kind of mad global trolley dash for raw materials. (A friend managing a national DIY chain warns that fence panel and garden shed shortages may be looming, as someone’s apparently been bulk buying Scandinavian wood stocks!)

Of course such fiscal gluttony on this scale leads to only one place, a huge surplus, and now we’re straight back to the woes of Tata Steel, Port Talbot and the good people of Scunthorpe. With the global market flooded with surplus steel, it’s a near impossibility to fund and sustain a viable UK steel industry and, whatever the brave political gestures, everyone in their heart knows it.

British steel, sadly, is very likely destined to go down the drain in the same way the great British coal, automotive and our other traditional industries went – an epic tragedy given that the whole industrial revolution thing was our idea in the first place.

Back in March 2014 Pope Francis held an audience for staff and workers of the ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Italy, where the 130 year old German-owned company was about to sack 550 workers in the interests of the ‘strategic needs’ of the parent company faced with pressure on all sides from global surpluses and the misalignment of needs vs wants.

In a clear reference back to Pope John Paul II’s landmark encyclical Laborem Exercens, which sought to put the human person at the centre of, and prime purpose of, human work, Pope Francis described the decimation of jobs across modern European industries as “the consequence of an economic system that is no longer able to create jobs, because it places in its centre an idol which is called money!”

As it happens I’m not convinced entirely that, of itself, wealth creation is such a bad thing, and I hope Pope Francis was more referring to the undue pursuit of wealth for its own sake, rather  than for the good wealth can do as much as the damage it can wreak.

Our present economic ills, and certainly those of the British steel industry and the Scunthorpe dilemma, are far more about greed, fear and blind panic than any premeditated economic strategy.

Perhaps that is what is destined to kill so much great British industry, and decimate so many people’s lives – the increasing inability of governments and the global family to think in anything other than purely selfish terms, especially when it’s a brutal battle for increasingly finite resources.

Coal and motor cars we’ve lost, and steel we’re losing, but few in positions of power and influnce seem to be that concerned. Most even seem content to be replacing manufacturing with service industries or, as the great Dominican social theologian Vincent McNabb once put it: to “replacing ‘things’ with ‘tokens of things.”

It may be steel today, but unfortunately it could be wheat tomorrow, and then, God help us all, the real wars will start!

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian.