Whichever way you cut it, there is no reasonable excuse for handing a Chinese steelmaker a multimillion-pound order when British Steel has said it is capable of providing the materials.
Business editor of Torygraph fails to ask “What’s the price?”
Ho Hum.
How do you price strengthening an enemy while weakening yourself? I’m not saying it’s 5x the Chinese steel price, or even 2x. But it ought to be calculable.
Enemy? Why are we allowing imports of cellphones from an enemy?
That’s a pretty good question.
I hear you can get cellphones cheap from the Israelis.
Israeli pagers are the bomb.
The commercial arrangements behind British Steel are odd but, although Starmer & Co might run the group operationally, ownership seems still to belong to Jingye, which means that the guaranteed profit on this boondoggle will flow to the Chinese owners, unless Starmer and co have made suitable arrangements to the contrary. Would you bet on the fact that they have?
No, definitely not. But I think it is a better thing for this country to have steel manufacturing facilities here than not. The ownership of the facilities bothers me a lot less.
“ The ownership of the facilities bothers me a lot less.” yeah exactly, who’s taking the risk with a steel mill/nuclear power station/etc that’s physically here but owned somewhere abroad. It’s not us who are here!
Rejecting something based purely on nationality of the supplier? That’s lacist!
Odd that you don’t mention that British Steel is a Chinese owned company. Jingye Group, a large Chinese multi‑industrial and steel company, acquired British Steel from the UK government’s Official Receiver in March 2020 after the firm entered insolvency.
Which makes this story nonsensical. Maybe British Steel don’t make the kind of steel required.
Further down the article, it immediately becomes apparent that this project is a total waste of time, verging on fraud:
“Set to be the world’s first gas-powered electricity plant with its own carbon capture and storage system, and capable of powering around one million homes, support for the project was unveiled to almost farcical levels of fanfare back in 2024.”
And (would be) capable of powering about 1.4 million homes if it wasn’t wasting energy capturing a harmless gas…
Trying to think of a suitable analogy. Making the first F1 car with a built in concrete anchor?
“Yes, UK-made steel might be more costly than its Chinese equivalent, but any premium will surely be recovered from the ripple effect that comes from job creation and regional growth alone.”
Oh lordy
Yes, we’ll all be far wealthier if none of us has a job and we all live on welfare. Or something, maybe turnips. Imported ones naturally.
This ‘jobs are a cost’ thing is getting to be as stupid for the blind followers of our host as the blind followers of the likes of Spud. Yes, of course for any given business jobs are indeed a cost. But for the country as a whole we do actually need to have productive work for people to do. You cannot extrapolate the situation of the individual business to the country as a whole. Rather like we make fun of Spud for concluding that because the banking system as a whole creates money individual banks can just create money out of thin air. Sometimes the aggregate is not the same as the individual case extrapolated.
No, we don’t.
“But for the country as a whole we do actually need to have productive work for people to do.”
We’d much prefer that we could have everything without anyone having to work.
Jobs really are a cost.
“We’d much prefer that we could have everything without anyone having to work.”
Well that’s as much a fantasy as the idea that human beings can make a socialist system work. No society has ever existed, nor will ever exist where everyone sits around and does nothing while having their every need attended to by someone or something else. If that’s the ideal your economic theory is working towards, then you’re as crackpot insane as the socialists.
At the risk of triggering Steve to go off on another God bothering rant, I’m a firm believer in the Biblical idea that he that does not work shall not eat. You don’t have to believe in the sky fairy to consider that the ancients may have known a thing or two, and written them down occasionally for the direction of their descendants. People need to earn their crust and any society that attempts to create a ‘workless paradise’ is doomed to fail, and fail hard.
You are taking that quote out of context – said context is that the Widows and orphans in the first century Christian communities were provided with food (and other necessities) by those Christians who had money (whether from earnings or savings). Paul’s dictum only applied to “free-riders” who were capable of earning a living but chose not to do so thinking that the Christians were a “soft touch”.
The Jews were commanded to give to thre poor and the Christians had inherited the core of the Jewish law (Exodus to Deuteronomy plus the Prophets) without some accretions from “the Scribes”.
And all evidence shows that places where work is hard to come by, and people can get by living on welfare etc are universally total sh*tholes. We have plenty of places in the UK today where most people survive without work – their food, shelter, heating and general expenses are paid by someone else and they have to do nothing in return for this. And these places are not paradises of limitless leisure, more monuments to what happens to people when they have nothing constructive to do with their lives, and no productive structures to live within. They don’t fill their lives with altruism, or creating great art, or generally adding to the social capital of their local area, they generally tend to indulge in self destructive behaviours to the detriment of themselves and everyone else around them. If the nirvana of workless abundance had an ounce of validity it should be showing itself in these places and it isn’t, quite opposite in fact.
Another old Biblical saw that has a lot of wisdom in it – the Devil makes work for idle hands.
Economic truth doesn’t always match up nicely with human nature. By the numbers, my ex was a helluva gal.
100%
“No society has ever existed, nor will ever exist where everyone sits around and does nothing while having their every need attended to by someone or something else.”
So, the idea of needing to create jobs is wrong then, isn’t it? We won’t be unemployed or pulling up turnips.
I can look around at all sorts of jobs that there now seem to be lots of and there weren’t 25 years ago. Like there used to be “gin”. Beefeater or Gordon’s, probably. Now there’s craft producers galore. My local shop has about 100 gins. You can go to Ramsbury distillery and have a “Bespoke Gin Experience” where you make your own gin.
Cars are made better since robots. We stopped hiring people to do most of the welds, but we now have more people doing materials testing, quality control etc. Toyota give you a 100,000 mile warranty now. Can you imagine that on an old Ford Escort?
Until we can all walk into a hospital and get surgery on the day for almost anything, and afford to do it, until we all have something as kickass as a Ferrari or Lamborghini on our drives, until women get their clothes tailored, there are jobs to be created. We don’t have these things because we’re too poor. People from 100 years ago would be astonished at how rich we are. They used to spend half a day’s wages on a novel. It’s about half an hour now.
Some definition of ‘rich’ when the country is close to £3 trillion in debt and spending £111 billion a year on interest alone. The ability of intelligent people to delude themselves about obvious facts never ceases to amaze.
Do you honestly think that the reason that food got cheaper over 80 years is because HM Government were subsidising it, and accumulating debt? And not that farming, food distribution and retail got more efficient?
But OK, let’s take that £111bn. Divide it by 70m people. That’s just over £1500 per year. And then imagine someone living in 1926. Could they, in real terms, spend £1500 per year and afford to fly to Spain on holiday? To have the food that we have? The communications that we have? The heating that we have? The books that we have?
Get fucking real. No, they couldn’t. The debt is a problem, sure. But we are far richer than we were back then.
sorry double post
Er… no. I don’t think I said that? Government gets in the way almost all of the time.
Why would we divide £111m by 70m people? How about we divide it by taxpayers? Or better still, higher rate taxpayers, since the rest are not paying enough to even be involved.
There are 7 million higher rate taxpayers in the UK.
That’s roughly £16,000. Per year. And rising.
And that’s without considering the unfunded liabilities which are far greater, and the debt itself, and the risk of interest rates rising.
They could if those things had existed, and they had been prepared and able to take out the relevant credit.
Our household debt is now more than £2 trillion. Excluding mortgages, we have unsecured debt of around £400 billion (averaging £14,000 per household)
Of course you can fucking fly to Spain and eat avocados if you’re prepared to pay for it maybe one day eventually.
We are not a rich country, not least because of the government, and a quick look at – for one small instance – the state of our roads makes that abundantly clear.
Ah, but our host is going beyond the ‘get rid of unneeded workers so they can go and find other productive employment instead’. He’s suggesting that the end point of all these job losses is where no one works at all and somehow [waves hands] everything is provided for them for free. And that such a society would be a noble and desirable aim. Apart from the utterly authoritarian nature that such a society would have to have (the provision of all the free stuff would be controlled by someone or something, and what each individual got would therefore be at that person/organisation’s whim) such a society would rapidly descend into complete disfunction, because human beings cannot cope without the discipline that work entails or without the ability to compete. They need a structure to channel their competitive urges to productive ends to create a decent society.
I argue that we should aim towards a society where as many as possible are engaged in productive employment of some sort, and such a society is the best type of human organisation we have. An economic system that suggests that the more people sat around doing nothing the better is as deluded as socialism is over the nature of human psychology.
Tim’s right. Jobs are a cost.
If we’re talking about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses, the scarcest resource of all is human time and energy. Clocks only go one way. Whatever you choose to do right now, it means you’re not doing the myriad other things you might be, and right now isn’t ever coming back, so you’d better use that time in the most valuable way possible, to you. And that’s what most people do, most of the time, according to their definition of valuable.
Only a minority of people enjoy their work. Most workers would rather spend their working time doing something else. People gamble in the hope that they can suddenly get enough money to be able to stop work.
An economy is goods & services, and all species have to provide their own. Humans are getting to a point where machines can provide some, so people who used to provide those goods and services can do something else instead. Rather than having a gang of men with plough-horses you now have a fuck-off tractor, so that gang of men do something else instead.
Then you get to the question of whether what people do with their time instead of working at jobs they dislike is good for them. For some it undoubtedly is. For many others – perhaps most – it evidently isn’t. We haven’t evolved to cope with not working.
Jobs are still a cost. The problem is that if they don’t work, some people instead do stuff that is even costlier, to them and to society.
Well its rather important to decide BEFORE you throw all the workers out of work what exactly they are going to do afterwards. We already have c. 25% unemployment in the UK, that is to say there are 11m people out of a working age population of c. 44m who are not in employment and claiming welfare of one sort or another. Some are looking for work (c.1.5m) the rest are not required to do so.
So if the workless nirvana was a thing we should be well on our way to it. Yet the UK is a sh*thole and the people living workfree lives are largely fucked in one way or another, mentally or physically. They aren’t exactly enjoying life that much.
If as you say we have not evolved to be workless (and I totally agree with that assessment) then perhaps it would be better to have an economic system that prioritised giving work to people rather than taking it away from them?
Problem is we now offer people a tolerable life on benefits, or (what they assume to be) a less tolerable life doing low-end work. Oh, sorry: we’ve just priced those jobs away, so the choice is bennies or bennies.
Even my poor fucking doctor daughter is only ever going to attain marginal affluence thanks to taxation and the ludicrous interest she has to pay on her student loan, which she’ll pay back in full. Even for her the question “what’s the point” looms.
I’d prefer to cut about the place in a golden chariot pulled by slaves while the 1995 version of Cindy Crawford gives me endless blowjobs.
The decision to use Chinese steel to help build Net Zero Teesside – a £4bn green power plant – has rightly prompted outrage, as well as demands for answers from bewildered ministers.
“How do competitive tenders work? What are incentives? Why aren’t you contracting with failed, state-owned cottage industries at 10x the cost?” – bewildered ministers
I like the idea of bewildered ministers, more likely to run into lions in a wilderness.
…aaaand: “Labour approves Chinese embassy despite security fears”
They really are bought and paid for, aren’t they? And they really don’t hide it. That’s not a brown dick up Starmer’s arse, it’s a yellow one. Commies, see.
You sure there isn’t a brown one as well as a yellow one???
It was probably a brown dick that led to the yellow one…..
Starmer knows he’s a dead man in any democracy. The MSM seem to be running scared. He’s given the legal profession millions and they’ve faithfully carried out his wishes without the need for obvious instructions. I imagine he’s feeling pretty invulnerable now. Miliband has been rewarding China with all his Net Zero malarkey. I thought the Chagos deal was just a scam between Starmer and Sands but it has the added bonus of a tie in with China. So all things considered, he’s going to be a very rich man and a possible link between WEF and China with the EU now on the back burner…
HEY – back off! That’s Mark Carney’s target job. Two-Tier is on his own.