Britain’s parliament is only recalled at times of national crisis. But when lawmakers were brought back from their Easter vacation last weekend, the cause was not a war, terror attack or the death of a monarch – but the potential closure of a steel plant in northern England.
The government said the owner of the British Steel complex in Scunthorpe, the Chinese company Jingye, was prepared to cancel orders for the raw materials needed to keep its blast furnaces burning, a step that would leave Britain unable to make virgin steel for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.
Parliament voted to take emergency control of the plant – and even reportedly used the police to deny Jingye staff entry to the site. Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has said full nationalization of the plant is “likely,” meaning the government could soon have to run a complex and costly manufacturing operation – a task it has long outsourced to private, and often foreign, companies.
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