Let British Steel deliver the final blow to Red Ed

Telegraph

13-04-2025

During the debate on Scunthorpe steel, Ed Miliband tweeted: 'Very proud to be in the House today to see my colleagues… standing up for British steelworkers.' Now that is some Trump-level trolling. Ed's net-zero fanaticism isn't what de-industralised Britain, but it makes it a billion times harder to reverse the trend – presenting Keir Starmer with a tricky a choice. Does he want to be green or to grow? Put another way: is it time to decommission Ed Miliband?
I have history with Scunthorpe. Back in 2010, I still harboured the hopeless dream of becoming a Labour MP. In a last roll of the dice, I submitted my name for the Scunthorpe nomination.
Why that seat? Steel. I might've been moving to the Right on immigration, but I remained a Bennite on economics (friends say: 'nothing's changed') – so I wrote a letter to constituents laying out a detailed case for tariffs. The selection meeting did not go well ('Ooo are ya?' they asked. 'I'm sorry, I can't understand the accent,' I replied), but the letter got rave reviews. In retrospect, I was ahead of my time.
I could see that manufacturing was getting screwed by both Right and Left. The Tories let it die in deference to the economic laws of nature. They asked: why should we make stuff we can import cheaper?
Because British steel has never competed in a truly free market. Because even if we don't have an industrial policy, other countries do. Our competitors protect, subsidise and dump their products on us; and there's a suspicion in Westminster that the Chinese bought Scunthorpe with the deliberate intention of running it down. Workers even blocked access to the site lest their owners try to sabotage it.
Right-wing globalisation went hand-in-glove with Left-wing greenery, allowing politicians to impoverish their countries while feeling good about it. Fly to an anti-carbon summit! Be serenaded by grateful Polynesians! Meanwhile, Britain's energy costs went up-and-up – a killer for steel, which is highly-productive (potentially profitable) but also energy-intensive.
Green policy and taxes played a key role in that price hike, and when Labour came into power last year, it also vetoed a new Cumbrian mine that could've supplied coking coal to Scunthorpe. Net zero is utterly surreal. To avoid pollution at home, we import it from abroad, stretching supply lines now threatened by global conflict.
Enter Ed Miliband, whose answer to such problems is to go greener, faster: end reliance on expensive fossil fuels, corner a new market first.
But to decarbonise and grow is often contradictory. The entire ethical basis for environmentalism is to conserve by reducing outputs – and the effect of any technological revolution is to reduce inputs by increasing efficiency. Were the Government to save Scunthorpe, the assumption is that the old furnace would be replaced with an electric version that requires less manpower, and fewer jobs. This transition might be necessary, but it will also be painful, and the insistence that we can all get richer by becoming greener increasingly sounds as unrealistic as 'diversity is our strength.' Milibandism is antithetical to the instincts and experience of working-class voters, who usually come off worse from change.
It's also increasingly antithetical to a Treasury desperate to kickstart growth. Hence Ed has been embarrassed three times since the new year: on airport expansion, a softened transition to electric vehicles and, now, the robust defence of an industry that depends on coal – but then Labour cannot alienate voters ahead of the local elections.
According to the polls, its position resembles an upturned iceberg: a vast parliamentary majority above water, a slither of popular support underneath. And like the real icebergs, it is melting. Starmer's instinct is to detach himself from all pre-election commitments and float free – as if he, alone among the world's statesmen, is dictating policy without ideology and solely in the 'national interest'.
By that logic, No 10 must be considering sacking Miliband. Downing Street denies it; Ed's people laugh off talk of resignation. But the fact that the press keeps asking indicates a direction of travel. The Government cannot trot out its mindless slogan 'backing the builders, not the blockers' while continuing to employ a man who can't pass a bulldozer without the temptation to lie down in front of it.
Miliband appears to be wildly popular with the membership, being a rare minister with personality and a sense of mission. But though Ed's enthusiasm is charming to true believers, many voters feel – as they did when they read his disingenuous tweet from the Commons – as if someone is having a laugh. Every video he puts out of him singing a love song to a turbine, or blowing kisses a solar panel, suggests he's enjoying his job a bit too much – that it's not Britain's project so much as Ed's project, that we're spending vast sums of money so that he can feel he's accomplishing something. Miliband has come to resemble one of those ancient nationalised industries the state once bankrolled because it couldn't face the political costs of shutting it down. Ed is a white elephant; the human equivalent of British Rail.
And he's a recruiting sergeant for the opposition. Reform has spotted an opportunity, a party staffed by free market liberals quickly rebranding itself as pro-nationalisation – plus anti-net zero, making it the natural go-to for the disaffected working-class. Never mind the English locals, all eyes are on the Welsh Assembly elections next year, where the southern part of the country might be facing its 2019 Red Wall moment.
Reform and Plaid Cymru are both asking why, when 2,800 jobs were at risk in Port Talbot, Starmer didn't consider nationalisation, yet for Scunthorpe, anything is suddenly possible? With the SNP making similar noises about the future of Grangemouth in Scotland, it's striking that the most compelling threat to Labour comes from competing forms of nationalism. Progressive with Plaid and the SNP, conservative with Reform; in all cases, anti-globalisation.
It's taken 15 years, but the country has basically come around to my position – too late, alas, for me to enter Parliament in 2010. My only other application for a seat that year was to Barrow-in-Furness, which I tried to impress with a letter about the benefits of nuclear disarmament. That's how I learnt, the hard way, that Barrow is where they make the submarines.