Huge boost for UK steel as deal done to supply Britain's railways with track saving thousands of jobs
BRITAIN'S railways will continue to run on UK steel — thanks to a deal which secures thousands of blast furnace jobs.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander will today sign a £400million contract with British Steel.
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The five-year agreement to supply 337,000 tons of track cements the firm as Network Rail's main supplier.
It also throws a lifeline to the Scunthorpe blast furnace plant — just two months after ministers rushed through emergency laws to save it from closure.
It was triggered after Chinese owners Jingye Group looked to shut it despite a £500million government support offer.
Ms Alexander said: 'This landmark contract truly transforms the outlook for British Steel and its dedicated workforce in Scunthorpe, building on its decades-long partnership with Network Rail to produce rail for Britain's railways.'
It also follows a backlash after Network Rail, which looks after Britain's 10,000 miles of railway track and infrastructure, was caught putting a separate £140million steel order out to global tender.
But officials insist British Steel will continue supplying more than 80 per cent of Britain's rail needs, with only smaller contracts going to European firms for specialist components.
Clive Berrington, from Network Rail, said yesterday: 'We are committed to buying British where it makes economic sense to do so and British Steel remains extremely competitive in the provision of rail and will remain our main supplier in the years ahead.
'Our European suppliers are an important part of our rail supply chain both for specialist items, and to ensure security of supply.'
The deal comes amid growing pressure on Labour in traditional steel towns.
Nigel Farage's Reform UK has been stirring support with promises to 'reindustrialise' Britain.
MPs urgently recalled to Parliament over national crisis as emergency law must be passed TODAY to save major UK industry
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
No jail sentence is long enough for the cowards who covered up for the Pakistani rape gangs
Thank heavens for Louise Casey. A report this week by the Baroness of Awkward Truths, which found that public bodies covered up horrific evidence about Pakistani-origin rape gangs 'for fear of appearing racist', has forced another humiliating reversal on Sir Keir Starmer. The smell of burning rubber is never far from our handbrake-turn Prime Minister, who has now accepted Casey's recommendation for a national inquiry. He had insisted that wanting such an investigation into those heinous crimes, the worst scandal in British history no less, was evidence you were marginally to the Right of Genghis Khan, or possibly even Tony Blair. Some 364 MPs shamefully voted against a statutory inquiry, including Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips who couldn't do enough for the traumatised victims until she stabbed them in the front. Baroness Casey's findings brought back an emotional encounter I had as I was leaving an event earlier this year. 'Forgive me for asking, Miss Pearson, but what happened to the British men?' The silver-haired American in sports jacket and tie in front of me had a concerned look on his face. I had just appeared on a panel discussing the Pakistani rape gangs chaired by Mark Steyn, who had campaigned relentlessly for their victims when he was a presenter on GB News. Survivors Sammy Woodhouse and Samantha Smith, my fellow panellists, had told the international audience about the ordeal they, and thousands of other British girls, had lived through. Not just being raped and tortured as children, but later stigmatised as prostitutes, criminals and liars in their twenties when they finally plucked up courage to speak out. Sammy recalled that police in Rotherham colluded openly with her abuser, Arshid Hussain, buying his drugs and tipping him off when he was about to have his collar felt. When officers found Sammy in bed with 'Ash', a 24-year-old British Pakistani, they arrested her for possessing an offensive weapon (which was his). The serial rapist with a rumoured string of more than 50 under-age girls in his highly-profitable harem was not held by police. Sammy was 14 at the time and pregnant. Still a child, then, although childhood and the bubbly, bright little girl who dreamed of being a professional dancer were long gone. After those two brave, articulate women up on stage finished telling their stories of almost surreal depravity, Steyn's audience – Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians, Americans, Brits – sat in horrified silence. Not quite silence; a lot of people were crying. A question hung in the incredulous air. How could the UK have allowed such monstrosities to happen to its kids and then allow it to be covered up for years until victims-turned-campaigners, like the two Samanthas, fought tooth and nail to bring it to public attention? Clearly, that's what was bothering the American. He was desperate to understand why British men had not protected their girls. 'See, where I come from, if they'd done that we'd have picked up our guns and…' I nodded. (To be fair, in the UK, when the Pakistani groomers briefly targeted Sikh girls, outraged Sikh men picked up baseball bats and taught them a lesson.) What to say? How do you account for a warped ideology that has taken hold in your country, a fatal blend of cultural incompatibility on the one hand and institutional cowardice and fear of 'Islamophobia' on the other? 'Many of the girls were in care or they came from troubled homes, so often they didn't have fathers to help them,' I began falteringly. 'Sammy's dad did try to rescue his daughter from a house where she was trafficked and police threatened to arrest him, not the groomers.' 'What the hell?!,' exclaimed the American. 'Exactly. What the hell. It's really to do with political correctness,' I went on. 'The Labour Party, which ran most of the towns where the grooming gangs operated, became dependent on Muslim votes and they were very reluctant to have the Pakistani community criticised. So the white, working-class girls (' who must have been asking for it') were not believed even though what was happening to them was evil. And anyone who dared to speak up for them was damned as 'racist', which was hugely damaging obviously, so mainly people stayed silent. Essentially, white kids were sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism. It was Votes for Girls, that was the deal.' (Revealingly, in an interview for this week's Planet Normal, Sammy Woodhouse told me that her abuser, 'Ash', was fully aware of the protected status he enjoyed as a British Pakistani Muslim, and happily exploited it. 'I'll just play the race card,' he used to say.) One thing I didn't mention to that American guy was the complicit role played by the media, notably the BBC, and others in the metropolitan bubble. Until 2013, when Andrew Norfolk of The Times revealed Sammy Woodhouse's story (with characteristic courage the Yorkshire lass waived her anonymity), the overwhelming evidence that Pakistani Muslim men preyed on 11-year-olds whom they disdained as 'white slags' was simply not admissible in polite society. (Even the heroic Norfolk, who sadly died a few weeks ago, initially held back on publishing because he feared the story was catnip to the far-Right). But Sammy had lifted the lid on child sex exploitation cases in her home town, prompting the Alexis Jay report which identified at least 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone. I vividly recall some of the hostile media reaction two years later to a previous take-no-prisoners Louise Casey report into opportunity and integration. The one in which the Baroness criticised public institutions that 'have ignored or even condoned regressive, divisive and harmful cultural and religious practices for fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic'. The Rotherham child abuse scandal, Casey concluded, was 'a catastrophic example of authorities turning a blind eye to harm in order to avoid the need to confront a particular community'. In the impeccably-liberal Prospect magazine, reviewer Oliver Kamm shuddered fastidiously. He condemned Casey's striking honesty as a 'vapid and ill-conceived intervention' which might have been designed to appeal to – quick, pass the smelling salts! – Farage and anti-immigrant tendencies. 'It warns that segregation and social exclusion are at 'worrying' levels,' Kamm complained. 'And it does so… without indicating what it would accept as countervailing evidence.' Such wilful blindness by members of a liberal elite to the problems posed by 'a particular community' continues to this day. Not long ago, in an interview for The News Agents podcast, former BBC maven Emily Maitlis attacked Rupert Lowe (ex-Reform MP, now an independent who has set up a separate inquiry with Sammy Woodhouse) for obsessing about Pakistani grooming gangs 'because probably you are racist and you don't believe there are white perpetrators'. It is Maitlis's sneering brand of superior ignorance, her arrogant stigmatising of critics of failed integration, that created the climate that allowed Pakistani perpetrators to continue violating the Samanthas and tens of thousands of other young girls with almost total impunity. Racism being a far worse crime than child-rape in the best circles, darling. The Home Office data which Maitlis drew on – saying most group-based child sexual offenders are white – always seemed absurd. (A quick look at the police mugshots for most grooming-gang trials quickly told you that white men, although heavily represented among paedophiles, were not the major villains in the trafficking of pre-teen and teenage girls.) How marvellous to see our Islamist-friendly Home Office thoroughly debunked in this new report from Baroness Casey. 'This audit found it hard to understand how the Home Office [2020] paper reached that conclusion, which does not seem to be evidenced in research or data.' Oops. Astoundingly, in our interview, Sammy Woodhouse recalled that 'in council safeguarding meetings, when I was a child who was being raped by a 24-year-old Pakistani man, there was an anti-racism co-ordinator'. That tells you everything you need to know about the priority of Labour authorities – and it sure as hell wasn't protecting innocent little girls. Keir Starmer must have had high hopes that Louise Casey would save him from the acute political embarrassment of the authorities in Muslim-voting Labour areas coming under scrutiny. (She had indicated she opposed a national inquiry.) What Labour really fears, I suspect, is that the discovery of a widespread cover-up of the industrial-scale rape of British children will pose existential questions about the ability of certain British Pakistani men to ever integrate into a society where women and girls are created equal. That's what Sammy Woodhouse thinks – she says any dual-national child-rapists must be deported. And which of us would disagree? 'I don't think this inquiry is going to get the justice that we need,' Sammy told me, 'because it's Labour investigating Labour. They're just chucking this out there to keep us quiet.' I pray that she's wrong, I pray that all her passionate campaigning for the ones who couldn't fight as she has fought pays off. Let's hope we will need to build new jails to house all the cowards who covered up for the rape gangs. Police, councillors, social workers, MPs, community leaders. Grown men who allowed little girls to endure such fathomless depravity. At least they will be sleeping less well tonight thanks to the Baroness of Awkward Truths.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Olympic rower and former cabinet secretary made peers
Olympic gold medallist Katherine Grainger and former cabinet secretary Simon Case have been given peerages, Downing Street has announced. The pair, along with former national security adviser Tim Barrow and former John Lewis chairwoman Sharon White, will join the House of Lords as non-aligned crossbench peers. Baroness Grainger, now chairwoman of the British Olympic Association (BOA), is Britain's most decorated female rower. In addition to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics, she won four silver medals – in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2016 – and six world championship titles. Baroness Grainger then spent eight years as chairwoman of UK Sport before leaving the post this year and taking up the leadership of the BOA. Lord Case became cabinet secretary in September 2020, having previously served as private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge. He stepped down at the end of 2024, having led the Civil Service during the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the funeral of Elizabeth II. But his tenure was not without controversy, as he was forced to recuse himself from leading an investigation into the 'Partygate' scandal following allegations his office had held a Christmas event during lockdown. Lord Case was not one of those fined over the scandal. Lord Barrow played a key role in Brexit negotiations as the UK's representative to the EU between 2017 and 2021, before becoming national security adviser under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. He had been lined up by Mr Sunak to take over as ambassador to the US, but the change of government last year led to Sir Keir Starmer appointing Lord Peter Mandelson instead. Baroness White was the first black person and second woman to become a permanent secretary at the Treasury, before serving as CEO of Ofcom between 2015 and 2019. She then chaired John Lewis between 2020 and 2024.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Offshore wind gets £400m windfall from Crown Estate
Britain's offshore wind industry has received a boost from the King's Crown Estate, which is investing £400 million in the supply chain for wind turbines at sea. A law passed in April means that for the first time the Crown Estate can borrow from the Treasury. In the past it had to sell assets to generate capital for investments but can now use its cash reserves for investing in energy and decarbonisation projects, given the flexibility to borrow as and when required. Much of the £400 million will go towards upgrading infrastructure at ports used to handle increasingly big turbines, some of which are nearly twice the height of the London Eye. A smaller portion will go towards early-stage schemes that include everything from how blades are made to the vessels that crews use to maintain offshore wind farms. Many wind turbine components are manufactured in Denmark and Germany, but some towers, cables and other parts are made in the UK. Nearly 40,000 people now work in Britain's offshore wind sector, up from 32,000 two years ago, according to figures from RenewableUK. On Tuesday the industry group said it would also invest £300 million in the sector's supply chain by 2035. The Crown Estate has a strong self-interest in offshore wind power. The body owns the seabed surrounding the UK and charges renewable energy firms money to develop projects in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A separate body, Crown Estate Scotland, handles the Scottish seabed. The leases for wind farms were a key reason the Crown Estate's profits doubled for the 2023-24 financial year, as they grew in importance in a portfolio that includes everything from shopping centres to farmland. • We mustn't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on wind power Britain is second only to China for installed offshore wind capacity. The technology is seen by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, as vital for meeting Labour's goals of clean power supplying 95 per cent of electricity by 2030 and offshore wind capacity quadrupling by then. Miliband's hopes were dealt a blow when a vast wind farm planned for the Yorkshire coast was scrapped last month, with its Danish owner blaming higher interest rates and supply chain costs. However, the Crown Estate has set an ambitious goal of offering an additional 20 to 30GW of offshore wind leases by 2030, up on an existing 11.8GW. 30GW would be enough to power all 28 million households in the UK. 'We will not unlock the full economic, social and environmental benefits of offshore wind without collaboration and investment into the UK supply chain,' said Ben Brinded, head of investment at the Crown Estate, as he announced the £400 million investment. • Climate adviser will lead push to create clean electricity grid by 2030 Offshore wind is on the verge of overtaking turbines on land, with 15.6GW of installed capacity compared with 15.8GW onshore. Labour's publicly owned energy firm, GB Energy, whose £8.3 billion budget survived the spending review, has talked of a 'huge opportunity' from investing in floating turbines, which can be placed in deeper waters. It recently announced the offshore wind supply chain would receive a £300 million investment. Separately on Tuesday, the government said it had reached a memorandum of understanding with China over action on climate change, including implementing Sir Keir Starmer's target of an 81 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2025. The agreement did not touch on commercial deals between the UK and China. Miliband said: 'We are witnessing the coming of age of Britain's green industrial revolution.'
