Do you ever read a story that’s so heartwarming and full of righteousness that you experience an involuntary shiver? It happens to me quite a lot, normally when reading about a buffoon’s downfall. And it happened again as I read about how the steelworks in Scunthorpe have been sort of nationalised.
This is a story where absolutely everyone comes a cropper. The Tories had to face up to the fact that if the Chinese owners were allowed to shut down the last plant of its kind on these shores, we would become the only G7 member with no steelmaking facilities. This worried their true blue traditionalism to such an extent that they were forced to abandon the central pillar of what made them a Tory in the first place, and vote in the Commons to confiscate the plant from private ownership and put the government in charge.
Things were no better for the Labourites because there they were, banging on about the need for net zero … but suddenly they realised that if they wanted to protect all those unionised jobs in Sunny Scunny, they’d have to take control of a steel plant and, to keep the blast furnaces running, immediately import coking coal from Japan. Can you imagine how that must have made Ed Miliband feel? Shivering yet? I am.
The fact is that all of those 11-year-olds who sit in the Commons, on both sides of the House, had to abandon their principles and vote against something they held dear. Because they’d come face to face with reality. The only way of keeping that plant open was to nationalise it and fill its ovens with Japanese coal. Hahahaha.
However, there is a small problem with the lake of warm fuzziness in which I find myself bathing. Because both ends of the political spectrum now have it in their heads that nationalisation is necessary in certain circumstances. So we can all be assured that in the coming months, there will be calls to bring water into public ownership, and the railway network, and energy, and everything — until it’s as though Mrs Thatcher never happened. Even Nigel Farage seems to be on board with this absurd notion.
Yes, obviously, those blast furnaces in Scunthorpe had to be kept alight because if you let them go out, they’re almost impossible to restart. And we do need to be able to make steel here, because like farming, it’s vital for national security. But look who’s now in charge, the extremely bearded business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds.
And what does he know about steel? Not much, I’d wager, since he studied modern history and law at university before becoming a trainee solicitor but never actually qualified and left in his mid-twenties to move into politics. This means, then, that he doesn’t have any experience of running a business at all. And he’s now in charge of British Steel.
He’s going to make a mess of it. Because he’s going to have Miliband in one of his ears, urging him to try and make metal using daffodils and tofu. And he’s going to have union officials in the other telling him that job losses cannot be on the table. And then he’s going to get a call from Land Rover saying that unless he keeps prices down, which will be tricky if he’s importing the fuel from Japan rather than digging it out of the ground in Doncaster, they will buy their steel from the Germans.
He’s already saying he needs a private partner to help him out and, hilariously, won’t rule out doing a deal with the Chinese. I bet the Chinese will though. Because why would they invest in a business now they know it could be confiscated at any moment?
One of the advantages about being old is that I can remember the 1970s. So I know for a fact that nationalised industries do not work. I can recall a British Rail sandwich and the Austin Allegro. And if you think our watercourses are bad now, I’d love to transport you back to 1974 and throw you in the River Don.
I know I’ll go to prison for saying this, but the National Health Service would work better if it was privatised. Because everything does. Sure, Thames Water is a disgrace and the service is diabolical. But can you imagine what things would be like if Angela Rayner was running it? There would be actual turds coming out of your taps. Don’t believe me? I’ll give you two words: Paula Vennells. (She’s the former Anglican priest who went on to be chief executive of the Post Office.)
Actually, I’ll give you two more: Millennium Dome. Last week I watched the docudrama The Diamond Heist, which, like absolutely everything else on Netflix these days, had come from the mind of the film director Guy Ritchie. Some will see it as a nostalgic look back to a time when villains didn’t earn a crust by riding around on scooters nicking phones. They had ambition and cunning. And the coppers didn’t just hang around at the nick all day, looking at potential hate crimes on Twitter. They got out there and they got stuck in.
Ritchie captures all this nicely but for me, the big story in the show was the location of the heist. The bloody Dome. I’d forgotten just how terrible it was. All that proto-woke bollocks. The faith zone and the celebration of ethnicity and that hollow woman. Hilariously, they expected 12 million visitors but because all the exhibits had been curated by Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and various other government idiots, they got barely half that. And now we find out — spoiler alert — that the centrepiece diamond wasn’t even real.
The Dome stands today as a handy reminder of the hopelessness of government. Because after the reins were handed over to private enterprise, it immediately filled up with Bon Jovi and Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac. And here we are now, 25 years after it was supposed have been pulled down, and it’s still going strong. Maybe because the frame was made out of privatised British steel.
