In the headlines

Ministers are scrambling to keep the Scunthorpe steelworks running after it emerged that the Chinese firm that owns it – Jingye – was depriving the UK's last two strategically important blast furnaces of critical coal and iron ore. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds is now in direct control of British Steel after emergency legislation and the necessary materials are on their way to Scunthorpe. The British army has been called in to deal with the Birmingham bin strikes, which have left more than 17,000 tons of waste rotting in the streets. Military personnel will offer logistical support after five weeks of deadlock between the council and the workers union, Unite. Rory McIlroy won the Masters at Augusta National yesterday, making him only the sixth player to complete a career Grand Slam – victory at all four major golf championships – and the first to do it since Tiger Woods in 2000. The Northern Irishman, who hadn't won a major since 2014, said after his victory: "I started to wonder if it would ever be my time."

Comment

Britain's last two remaining blast furnaces in Scunthorpe. Getty

The British Steel debacle was inevitable

Keir Starmer detests everything about Boris Johnson, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But hearing the prime minister endlessly proclaim that Britain will be a "green energy superpower", I can't help thinking he might have something in common with the "great fabulist". The only race Britain is winning in relation to green energy is the "race to deindustrialise". Take the furore over British Steel: the Chinese owners Jingye are "no angels", but they're not wrong when they say our "world-beating" high energy prices (in part the result of green policies) make it impossible to maintain the UK's last remaining "virgin steel" manufacturing plant without vast subsidy.

Now that the Scunthorpe steelworks are in the hands of the government – after Starmer's entirely unnecessary "political stunt" of recalling parliament on Saturday – the taxpayer is on the hook for the "coking coal" required to run the machines. Thanks to Ed Miliband's insane decision in November to block all new UK coal mines, including a spanking new facility planned in Cumbria to extract precisely this sort of metallurgical coal, the stuff is being shipped over from the Far East. It would be greener to simply dig it up ourselves, with the benefit of all the domestic jobs and tax that would generate. By contrast, India's minister for coal and mines ("yes, they have a minister especially for that") recently celebrated on X: "1 BILLION TONNES of coal production" ensuring a "brighter future for every Indian". What the Indians understand is that economic growth is powered by cheap, abundant energy. Miliband and Starmer, meanwhile, are so captured by Net Zero that they've even closed the North Sea to new drilling. No wonder Just Stop Oil says it has "won its battle". It won't take a global trade war to end Britain's industrial power – our own perverse policies are doing that already.

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Nature

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