British strength was built on steel, net zero is emasculating us
If the sinews of war are endless money, its skeleton is steel. Although steel has been used for edged weapons for many centuries, it was far too expensive to be used in large quantities. Only with the discovery of cheap production methods could steel became one of the basic materials of all modern life, and indispensable for modern weapons.
It was the Crimean War in the 1850s that stimulated a British inventor, Henry Bessemer, to invent the first method of making cheap and reliable steel by blowing air through molten iron to burn off impurities, making Sheffield a world centre of steel-making.
Prussia soon copied British technology, and its fateful victory over France in 1870-71, creating the German Empire (and annexing France's iron-ore fields), had been largely due to the development by Krupp of breech-loading steel artillery. Within a decade, the French, then the British, were building steel warships with steel boilers for high-pressure steam generation.
So steel is not an ordinary product. Although cheap grades were soon being used in vast quantities for railway tracks, bridges and high-rise buildings, its higher grades were always crucial for artillery, ships and a vast range of military hardware.
Many millions of tons were used by all combatants in both world wars. Britain's steel production was only about half that of Germany by 1914, and steel had to be imported from America and Sweden, as it did from the US again in the Second World War, increasingly after British production peaked in 1942. At that time, America and Germany were the biggest producers. Now, of course, it is China.
So Britain has long since ceased to produce all the steel it needs, but today's situation, in which it risks becoming completely dependent on imports for even the most crucial strategic items – including high-grade 'virgin' steel for submarines, aircraft engines (one of our biggest exports) and nuclear reactors – is unique in our history and unparalleled in any other advanced country. It has clearly panicked the Government into last-minute intervention.
This is necessary, but that we have reached this point – not least in that our last manufacturer of high-quality virgin steel was sold to China, which has an interest in closing it down – is proof of extraordinary fecklessness by successive governments. There have been several steps on the way.
It was decided to shift our remaining steel production to electric arc furnaces – which only produce lower-grade steel from scrap, and also require vast amounts of uninterrupted electricity. The present government ended the plan to open a new coal mine for coking coal – essential for primary steel production.
All this, perhaps needless to say, is due to the net-zero fantasy, which has also raised energy prices to a level at which many industries, not only steel production, have been made uncompetitive.
The Government pretends it can run a 21st-century economy with medieval technology – wind power. And by importing steel and other products that can no longer be made competitively here, we are merely relocating the emissions they create, having no positive effect on atmospheric pollution, and undoubtedly making it worse.
So far, the Government has made only the smallest and least-effective gestures, such as slightly delaying the target date for electric vehicles, and now desperately trying to postpone the closure of the Scunthorpe furnaces.
This is nowhere near being a serious industrial strategy or a credible defence policy. Unless it is abandoned or postponed, net zero will not only impoverish us, but make us more vulnerable than we have been since the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway in 1667.
Robert Tombs is professor emeritus of history at the University of Cambridge
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