Making Plans for Steel Is an Eternal UK Song
Britain’s efforts to keep its steelmaking industry alive are producing some uncomfortable compromises.
Photographer: Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Images EuropeSteelmaking in the UK has been in decline for a long time — so long that even the 1979 XTC hit Making Plans for Nigel, which envisioned its subject having his future “as good as sealed” with a job at British Steel, was a satire on out-of-touch parents. At that point, the industry had already shed tens of thousands of jobs and was heading into a period of much sharper retrenchment. Today, the sector employs about 37,000 people, not much more than a tenth of its early 1970s peak. Yet the quest for a revival goes on.
The government’s UK Steel Strategy published last week is suffused with the language of growth and opportunity, words that between them appear more than 100 times in the 72-page document. Decline gets three mentions. Labour is taking bold steps to change the downward trend, runs the ministerial foreword, setting out a vision to build a “revitalized and resilient” sector that’s a world leader. There’s nothing wrong with positive thinking; defeatism gets you nowhere. But history and global trends are against the country that invented modern industrial steelmaking.