Beg borrow or steel

the new statesman. Well, I'm fourth or fifth generation steel worker. My great grandfather, grandfather, father are working in the industry. When I was a young boy, I had an off-facing bedroom. And at that point, we had three steelworks in school. I thought one was normally park, one was Redmond Steelworks and the other was Appleby Frodenham. And when

Normally parts of the hill works at night would tip its slack, it would light my own bedroom up with all orange, reds, yellows, you name it. So I went to bed every night with the steel industry there in the front bedroom, if you like.

Tony Gosling joined the Scunthorpe Steelworks straight out of school as an apprentice. And apart from a brief stint in the army, he stayed there, keeping the furnaces burning as an engineer for the past three decades. The Steelworks still dominates Scunthorpe. Walking along the main road from one end of the site to the other can take almost an hour. It remains the major independent employer in the area.

I mean, I'm just trying to think where I live, $3 up was Jamie works in the boss plant as Malacross her order worked in the medium section mill. How he worked in the every section mill, around the corner, Karl Marta worked in the plate mill. You know, if I go around our street, there's still a lot of people that have worked, I'll still work in the steel industry.

After the closures in Port Albert last year, Scunthorps, two blast furnaces, Queen Anne and Queen Bess, became the last remaining primary steelmaking facility in the UK. There were reports, though, that those facilities, too, were soon to be mothballed. 2,500 jobs lost before Christmas.

But it did a lot of damage, and it wasn't pleasant, and a lot of people did leave on the back of that. This is Insight from the New Statesman. I'm Kate Lambel. Despite those reports, Smoke is still rising from the scumforb steelworks. Talks are continuing between Jingyi, the Chinese company which owns the plants and the government about its future.

Labour, of course, came to power promising to accelerate the move to net zero, including making the steel industry, which produces over 13% of the UK's manufacturing emissions greener. They pledged around £3 billion to the issue. So is there a cleaner, brighter future for British steel ahead? Or will scumthorps furnaces simply be the last in the UK to go dark?

Tony Gosling is also a Labour councillor, but as a man who spent decades with Scunthorpe's steel, he still thinks the product is essential. It's in your clothing, it's in your home, it's in your car, it's in your pocket because if you've got set of keys, you've got steel in your pocket so it's everywhere. And if we're not part of that, then UK manufacturing somewhere down the line will strongly struggle.

There are three unions on the Scunthorpe site. Martin Foster is the branch convener for one of the largest, Unite. It's not just jobs. We've got a bigger player as this in a town that's gone through. It's not just jobs. It's families, it's communities, it's businesses. It's all linked. They're all intrinsically linked together. Martin has been through round after round of redundancies over the years, including in 2019, when Chinese company Jing Yi became the latest to take over the site.

There was four women came into my office, still in their coats, half I stayed in the morning, they'd been told to clear the desks and go out on gardening leave until the end of the week, at which point they'd been married, doesn't it? And it was all I could do, not to burst into tears, because I just felt so helpless. There was nothing I could do.

And here, I should be clear. A push to reduce emissions is far from the only thing affecting the viability of British steel. A glut of international production has pushed down steel prices. And overheads, including the price of electricity here, mean production is expensive. According to some reports, it can cost as much as $200 to produce one ton of British steel.

Whereas in China, the figure is closer to $10, 20 times lower. Competing has become difficult. And a lot of it does hail back to the lack of investment. And I know people will probably roll their eyes at this point. It goes back to Maggie Thatcher's days.

She privatised us, she put us back into private hands and successive owners rather than invest the money in modernising and keeping us competitive, they just sucked out what money they could and did the bare minimum they needed to do to keep it running. Keep the dragon breathing as we've always called it.

Martin describes it as a sticking plaster approach. Owner after owner, government after government has focused simply on the next problem to present itself, rather than the long view.

We keep taking the easy option. Whenever we're going to get somebody with a little bit of vision, it's going to look further ahead and take the difficult step or the right step to invest in new technologies. For instance, one of our blast furnaces is capable of running on natural gas, but we're still putting coal and coal into it. Why are we not piping it up to an actual gas line and running it on gas? It's not going to make it completely green, but it will make it a whole lot greener than it is at the moment.

One of the options being considered at the moment are electric arc furnaces. As the name suggests, rather than relying on coke, which is a coal-based fuel, these create the high temperatures needed for steel production from electricity, electricity which can come from renewable sources.

An electric arc furnace is what will be built in Port Talbot, and British Steel has planning permission for one to be built in Scunthorpe, another in T-side. These furnaces melt down and reuse scrap steel, which we currently export.

But there are issues. Firstly, they take far fewer workers to run. Many have raised concerns that if every blast furnace is closed, the UK will lose the ability to produce so-called primary steel directly from iron ore, increasing reliance on imports. Here's Tony Gosling.

If we lose our capability to produce iron in this country, Tony is using iron here to mean steel and iron alloy. But the only G7 country that does not produce iron will be the only G20 country that does not produce iron in the traditional way. And that would be, for me, a false folly going forward. I'm quite honest.

And while the UK is considering going all in on electric arc technology, elsewhere, other options are being developed. In Sweden, hydrogen gas produced with renewable energy has been used to produce fossil-free primary steel. In the US, there are pilots which use electrolysis. Some, like Martin Foster of Unite, worry that moving too fast risks gambling on the future of the industry. Long-term security is what he's looking for.

Louise Haig paid us a visit and I said to her, look at this, the £3 billion. Fantastic. But what comes after that? Because I said, if that's all we're talking about, just money, then we'll be coming back again. And none of us want to be there. We've been there, got done so many times already. We've fed up with it. £3 billion, fantastic. But what about your industrial strategy? What about your energy strategy?

Politicians from all parties recognise what job losses or new investment could mean for their electoral prospects. And we'll come back to the political row brewing a little bit later. But first, we've got to ask what the government could do to set the industry up for long-term success.

Sam Alvis is the Associate Director for Energy Security and Environment for the Think Tank IPPR, or the Institute for Public Policy Research. There's been significant discussions about how threats to the British steel industry are being brought by our need to reduce emissions, the need to hit our climate targets.

How true is that? And how much of this picture is other things? Things like the fact that it is simply a lot cheaper to make steel in China than it is in Britain.

So I think what we've got to look at this situation is that it is a global issue, but we've British characteristics. So there is an imperative to reduce the emissions from the steel industry. Now if you look at the Climate Change Committee, the Augusta Institution that advises government on their climate targets, they say that the bulk of those emissions reductions will happen in the mid 2030s. So it's not imminent, but we need to start preparing for it.

What is a much larger threat to the steel industry at the moment is two things. The first, there is an international glut of production. There is a huge amount of steel in circulation, and that is causing the price to drop. The British characteristic being it's also very expensive to produce it here. And the second is in UC&G of politics, the rise of trade and nationalisation is that countries are starting to protect their domestic industries to a higher extent.

either because they're decarbonizing or because they want to protect domestic manufacturing. A spinoff of that is that we've seen an increase in tariffs or border adjustments that is erasing the price of steel imports and exports. I mean, we've heard from lots of the steelworkers in this program about the importance of keeping a British steel industry going and having that productivity ourselves that we're not reliant on anyone else.

Well, there's a number of ways of looking at this and I think the importance of understanding a foundational industry like steel is effectively it is a hedge against geopolitics. But then that brings you to the question is what do you think is going to happen in geopolitics and therefore what do we need to produce here? So you've had a conversation about the shift from the current polluting blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces which are more environmentally sustainable, but they produce different kinds of steel.

90% of steel uses we know can be made through electric arc furnaces but that last 10% of pristine high value steel which goes into things like in the defense industry you can't really make with an electric arc furnace.

But the question is, do we need to make that here? Because even if you're using blast furnaces or some of the future technologies that can make that pristine high value steel, you might still have to import iron ore, for example, or various other bits. But it's not the case that electric art furnaces or blast furnaces. One is the perfect solve to economic resilience.

So there might not be an immediate net zero pressure that we're looking more at the medium term, but we've got to plan for these things, especially when you've got to get planning permission and build huge new furnaces and everything else. Climate scientists and campaigners, they always talk about this just transition. I mean, that term is in the Paris Climate Agreement as well. What do they mean when they talk about a just transition?

I think one of the difficulties is that different groups of people mean different things by just transition. You've got the global just transition, which is ensuring that poorer countries are able to decarbonise and a rich countries decarbonise faster. You've then got the next level down, which is communities. So are poorer or disenfranchised communities in the UK not adversely hit by the transition to net zero, or even better, do they benefit from it?

And then you've got where I think the unions are of adjust transition is, are those workers or the workers one step removed involved in high polluting industries protected, supported and enabled to transition themselves from those high polluting industries?

You've said that in the past there's been this, I'm going to say short termism even though you didn't use the word. They're thinking about, oh, what do we do in the short term? Not these sort of long term R&D projects. Is there any evidence that Labour are doing things differently this time? This is one of the situations where really we need to see what happens.

the end of this bailout deal for British Steel to be able to test whether they have thought long-term. It's certainly in keeping with their rhetoric. And one of the promises elsewhere to move to, for example, like a 10-year R&D budget is crucial. And the reforms that you've seen to the National Well Fund, which is Labor's promise to use the state initiative finance to bring forward green technologies, these are arms of the state, which are now really set up to make these decisions and make them easier. But it just needs now to happen.

and some of these things I think have gone a little bit slower than those in Scumfort might have been hoping for. Is there anything else you'd like to see from the government beyond that joined up thinking, that long-term view?

I think it's the idea that as part of your industrial strategy, it is not just a question of what tools do we use and when. It is a fundamental question of what do we think the UK economy is for and then how it should be structured. So we come back time and time again to the British steel industry. It's what are you using British steel for and therefore what kind of steel do we need to make and therefore what technologies do you need and how are we going to support those technologies to fruition.

I think without that fundamental assessment from the British government over that, then you're always slightly treading water with your subsequent decisions.

With the climate, we are sort of in a new world. Trump's back in the White House, he's taken the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement again. I mean, last time, no other countries followed the US and it sustained. Is there any chance, though, that with the economic pressure that we know that Trump has exerted on other countries, that Labour might move away from their climate goals or the public pressure,

could change and that these arguments that we're seeing in the Labour Party at the moment about growth and about opportunity versus net zero, the dial on that might shift.

It's a good question there. It's one that a lot of people are thinking about at the moment. And I think we need to separate rhetoric from reality. So Trump is obviously in term for four years. And there is a question for government for David Lamia's foreign secretary is how much you want to champion the rationale for things being done as for climate reasons versus

the decisions that you're taking to decarbonise, you're using to reach those other objectives, whether on growth, whether on increasing trade with partners. So to take something like steel, we can't guess what current Trump is going to be putting on. But the question is, do you still think you should have a foundational steel industry in this country? And there is not a future for the steel industry that is not decarbonised. Like we've seen demand for green steel going through the roof. And it's not just America we've got to remember. The European Union are

going to be putting in place something called a carbon border adjustment mechanism. CBAM. CBAM, exactly. And that is a charge at the border on the carbon intensity of your product, partly to allow their economy to decarbonise, but also to protect their domestic industry. If we don't reduce the carbon from our steel, then we are rapidly running out of our exports, export potential, particularly to our closest neighbour. So

Yes, we might see a change in rhetoric. I don't think that changes your rationale now more than ever. We need economic and environmental and energy security in the face of people like Trump. But there are other partners we need to think about as well. We know from polling that the British public was very, very behind taking action on climate change. It sees it as an important priority.

But with the economy, with growth, do you think that these ideas will have to be presented in a different way, that you'll need to talk about growth at the centre of the decisions that they're making as opposed to the climate? Will people's priorities shift?

The British public is fundamentally pro-environment and they want to do stuff which is good for the environment and that includes climate change that is good for future generations. That well of positive sentiment is always there and it's not going anywhere. But the question we have at the moment is that climate change has fallen in salient so like the level of priority you would give to that issue above things like economic security.

And I think what the job for government to do is to use your climate outcomes so we need to reduce emissions to deliver those other outcomes that the British public are prioritising. And you can say, for example, we're providing you access to get an electric vehicle or we're reducing the price of electricity.

all of which is good for people because it reduces their running costs, it reduces the pressure of day to day bills. But these are the fundamental things that we need to do to also tackle climate change. And you may not say, this is a fundamental reason we're doing this as climate change, but you can always with the British public, and like the American public or in other places, fall back on afterwards. Oh, and by the way, this is really good for the environment. So yes, it's good for your pocket, but also it's good for the environment. And that public opinion isn't shifting at the moment.

So you seem to be suggesting that we're fundamentally different from the US in that regard.

Yes, 100%. So the levels of support we see for net zero and climate change are much, much higher consistently. We aren't yet seeing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. Although there are, I don't want to suggest a level of false confidence. It is a time of slight concern that you are starting to see support on the right. For example, for concepts like net zero starting to drop. And it is the job of government to show that actually net zero can benefit people to to arrest that decline.

Thanks, Sam. If you'd like to start your new year by subscribing to access more new statesman content, you can get your first five weeks for five pounds with our special January sale offer. Just visit newstatesman.com forward slash gen 25 for details. We'll be back in a few minutes when we'll talk about how politicians have been responding and trying to use this situation to their advantage.

Welcome back to Insight from the New Statesman with me, Kate Lamble. I'm now joined by Meghan Kenyon, the New Statesman's policy correspondent. She's actually been in Scuntle reporting this story for this week's New Statesman magazine. And Meghan writes about how this isn't just a policy or economic decision, it's also an emotional issue. And emotions mean votes are at stake for politicians. Meghan, briefly then, what is the political landscape in Scuntle?

At the moment, Scunthorpe has a Labour MP, Nick Deakin, who has been the MP for quite a long time before 2024, but he lost his seat in 2019 because Scunthorpe was part of the Red Wall seats which were targeted by Boris Johnson. In fact, it was one of the six seats that Boris Johnson said he needed to win to get Brexit done. So they had a Conservative for about five years and now Nick Deakin is back.

But it's quite sort of a patchwork. I mean, North Lincolnshire Council is run by the Conservatives and Reform are currently putting a lot of resource into winning Greater Lincolnshire and Richard Tice, the Deputy Leader of Reform. He didn't win Scunthorpe, but he won in Scagnes, which is sort of further south in Lincolnshire. Yeah, and Boston, which is also in Lincolnshire, famously one of the most Brexit voting constituencies in the UK. So yeah, it's quite a patchwork of political opinions and political parties.

So this election just gone. Was the future of the steelworks an issue on the doorstep? I spoke to Nick Deakin, actually the day before I went up to Scunthorpe. I met him in his offices in Westminster. And yeah, I asked him whether it had come up and he said it had. But we weren't able to say...

The Labour government, if it is a Labour government, is committed to a 2.5 billion pound investment in the steel industry. Whereas, if you look at the truck record of the Conservatives, they failed to take the opportunity to invest in the steel industry. We should have done that three, four years ago. We would have been in a much stronger position than we are now. Instead, they dearly died. It's almost as though, like with infected blood, with postmasters, they almost

the steel industry into that difficult intro for the incoming government almost deliberately, which is shameful and irresponsible. So Labour think that they've got a message that they can take action on this. What about the Conservatives? I mean, we heard earlier in the programme Sam Alvis from the IPPR.

He talked about how in the US fighting climate change, making this just transition is a partisan issue there, whereas here it's not that case yet. Are they taking a different tact from Labour? What is really interesting about the Conservatives is that under Boris Johnson, they had quite a few green industrial strategy style policies. But when Rishi Sunak came in and

particularly when Claire Katino took over as energy secretary, that was when in the King's speech, Rishi Sunak decided that we would take out new oil and gas licenses and essentially towards the end of their time in government, this conservatives sort of ended the consensus. They'd sort of felt around net zero and started spending most of their time defending that oil and gas decision. Now, on steel in particular, I think they continually kicked the can down the road. I think a steel strategy was promised.

But instead, they sort of moved from crisis to crisis. So in 2019, when Boris Johnson had just come in, British Steel actually went into liquidation and the government was forced to sort of negotiate. And that was when Jing Ye, the Chinese owner of British Steel, actually took over. And there was a sort of apocalyptic, oh, the steel industry is going to collapse, which kind of feels like where we're still at today, to be honest. So how does that play out locally then in places like Skondorpe? Because you said the Conservatives are still running North Lincolnshire Council.

Yeah, so I think it's particularly interesting when you put it on a local level, because obviously, so I spoke to Rob Baltham, who's the leader of North Lincolnshire Council. He's always going to stick up for the people in Scunthorpe, the people that he represents. When I spoke to him in Divergence from Clercatino, or Kenny Baidnock in the National Party, he was sort of making the case that, look,

Skuntorp is incredibly reliant on these steelworks. There's so many people whose whole entire family has worked there. Is he critical of Labour's actions on the steel industry then?

I think he wasn't necessarily critical explicitly of Labour. He was more critical of the failure of successive governments to kind of get a grip on this, and also of British Steel's successive owners to kind of work out a way through this. He said he hasn't actually met with anybody from the government yet. He did meet with the Conservative ministers, but he said he's very open to if Jonathan Reynolds wants to knock on his door. He's there.

One thing I did say about, I would say about the last government, when the industry was under pressure, you know, the then Prime Minister said, well, we'll pay the wages of the steel workers, which they did for a year.

to make sure we could keep the sites operable. So that's something that they did do, what I would hope to see. And we're not in that stage yet, I would hope to see a similar level of commitment from this government, because I think that would certainly reinforce a commitment to steel, but it would reinforce a commitment to this area.

You also mentioned Andrea Jenkins, the former Tory MP. She obviously announced her move to reform UK. She's running as a candidate for the newly created mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. And you asked her about her plans for steel. I mean, look, we're not in power, are we laboring power? So they've got their own plans. But all I can really say is what I would do at a local level. I mean, to me, I think that the

Look, producing steel, producing energy has got too expensive now, because I think successive governments, including my old government of the Conservatives, their push for net zero, the carbon credit scheme, has made producing energy in Britain too expensive, and then there's knock-on effects with the consumer as well and having to import energy. And so I think what I could do as mayor, actually, is ensure that

We have better transport links. I mean, we've got here British Steel, amazing with their motorway links, but we know that trains, buses and the roads are not great across the county. So we could look at better transport links, but also, I mean, when I visited British Steel, you know, as we are here today, when I visited them a few weeks ago, they haven't got enough engineers to really help them grow.

And so, as I just mentioned earlier, the whole skills agenda is going to be so important. We need engineers up here. We need people in the south who, you know, the breadbasket of the UK. We feed Britain in Lincolnshire with the agricultural and food sector.

So we joined up thinking, so I think that getting people the skills so we can actually future proof their business is going to be very important. Andrew Jenkins talked there about the cost of previous net zero schemes, but then she talked about the action she would take and it was all about transport links. There might of course be limits on what local politicians can do with issues like this.

At a national level, though, do reform have a plan when it comes to things like industrial strategy. Richard Tice, who is the deputy leader and economic spokesperson for reform, and as I mentioned, MP in Skegnes, he has said that under no circumstances are we losing the sight and scum thought. He's gone as far as to say reform would nationalize steel completely. Now, what I found interesting when I spoke to Andrea Jenkins was she favored the deregulation approach, which

I mean, it might be that I'm missing something here, but I can't really marry the two approaches. We're going to deregulate and nationalise at the same time. Yeah. I mean, Richard Tyson, Andrea Jenkins famously did fall out before the last general election, when I think Tice accused her of bribing a reformed candidate who was running in her seat, which she subsequently lost. I mean, both of them did it. It went to the Labour Party.

But yeah, I think Richard Tice, if I'm being honest, it seems like he's got more of a vision for what he would do, whereas Andrea Jenkins is sort of responding more on a local level, kind of saying she would make it easier for steelworkers to get into the plant. But nobody I spoke to in Scumthorpe said that that was why it was folding. It's more a question of what is the future of British steel and what's the business case for it? It's not about, can I get the bus there?

Amid all these national discussions, there's also something local going on here, because when you went up to Scantorpe and you talked to so many people about what was going on there, a lot of them mentioned another figure in North East politics, didn't they? Yes.

Conservatives were in government shortly before the election. I think there was discussion around greening up the steel industry, and part of that involved the opening of new electric arc furnaces. I think there have been discussions about having the site in Scunthorpe, having electric arc furnaces, and then having some in T-site, which would be brilliant for Ben Houchin, who is the mayor of T-site.

I spoke to a few people including Nick Deakin, Scantop's Labour MP, who said that Ben Houchin had been involved in some way. So there are some people who are, you know, making some

understand that is just political mischief and indeed if those people have done the right thing at the right time with their government we wouldn't be talking about these things now we'd be several several miles along the journey yeah yeah I suppose that's Ben Houchin's patch isn't it yeah and he is the person who's making mischief I mean he's a genius at mischief genius at misinformation

And we live in a world where mischief and misinformation are very attractive. But frankly, if we actually want to improve the world we end, we've got to focus on facts. We put these accusations of mischief and misinformation to the mayor of Tees Valley, Ben Halchin.

The New Statesmen's been doing some reporting up in Scunthorpe about the future of the steel industry. And when we were there, we were told by several people in Scunthorpe that stories in the press about both of Scunthorpe's blast furnaces closing were thought to emanate from you or your office. The local MP, Nick Deakin, said you were a genius at mischief and misinformation. Is there any truth to those claims?

Well, I'm not sure what he means by mischief and misinformation. It is objectively true to say that the second blast furnace has closed down a number of times. It's very difficult to keep open, a very unsafe structure, as has been the case for many, many years now. It is also true to say that in the transition to electrical arc furnace steelmaking, whether that being scum for tea side or both, it is absolutely true and has been admitted and stated as fact and non-record by this government and its ministers.

that the blast furnace will close. And actually, it will close before the electric arc furnace is ready and open. So those two things are completely true. They can be fact checked. It's gone hand-starred of mine from various journalistic and media statements from the minister. So I'm not entirely sure what the problem is. I mean, I've been talking about this now for three or four years. So it's nice now that all of a sudden it becomes a bit of a crisis that labor MP since going forward, starting to jump on the bandwagon. But I've been a Canadian coal mine for some time now.

And it's unfortunate that we didn't have the support back in the day when we could have avoided it catastrophically. I mean, whether both electric arc furnaces, which are being talked about, are built in sconthorpe or one comes to T-side, that is very consequential for you. You pledged in your election campaign that you would bring back steelmaking to T-side. So when someone like Nick Dayton talks about mischief, is he the implication there, I suppose, is that the benefit to you is if there is a problem with sconthorpe, if those facilities are brought to T-side to your area?

Yeah, but you could also make the same argument to Nick, right? Nick's creating mischief because he wants somebody to blame for his lack of involvement in this Labour government that he's going to believe British steel down a garden path and pose it to close, right? We can have both sides of that argument. What is objectively true that in 2021, at an up until the general election, British steel submitted plans to the government to build the first electric arc furnace in tea side to keep the blast furnaces open in scunthor and then for a second to follow in scunthor. There was a general election, a new government and

for whatever reason, everything seems to have changed. Nobody really knows what's going on. Other negotiations between the government and Xinye are very, very private. They've largely cut out senior staff from British Steel and some of the unions, because they were leaking every part of the negotiation to the press. It is in a very precarious position. And so what we want, actually overarching in all of this, forgetting T.S.I. and Scumthorpe, what we need is to maintain primary steelmaking capability in this country.

The only way i believe you can do that and british steel agree with me the facts on the ground agree with me but if you want electric harp furnace steel within the next three years the only place to do is tea side it's the only place and if you want to avoid that gap in prime steelmaking which is a huge issue for national security purposes it's a huge issue for jobs and investment then the government needs to recognize that.

wrap a huge amount of care and support around the workers in the community in Scunthorpe. Help them transition more quickly, but not ignore the commercial facts of the matter, which is it's going to take many years to put a spade in the ground to do anything in Scunthorpe. Never mind actually achieve something that's going to deliver jobs for local people. Ben Houchin.

Meghan, what does Scunthorpe tell us as like a microcosm of these future conversations that we're going to have about this just transition, about net zero? This issue isn't going away, whether we're talking about Scunthorpe or more generally other industries across the UK. What does it tell us about how those political issues will be discussed when they come along?

I think what is sad to me is that these kinds of issues because they involve people's lives, because they involve big choices which often involve trade-offs. It's so easy as we saw with the conservatives in the subsequent end of consensus over net zero there, they become these political footballs. We lose the nuance when we say,

It's climate campaigners net zero against working people and working people's jobs It's not as simple as that because actually the transition to net zero Needs to happen in order to protect those jobs, but you need to do it in a way that

You need to bring people along with you in doing it. So I think that there's a real challenge for labor here because there'll be several other places like Scunthorpe, which are having these kinds of issues. I mean, we saw with Port Talbot and Tata Steel, and then Grange-Mirth, which is not the steel industry, but is an oil refinery and was in the news this weekend because of the discussion of whether it'll be used for sustainable aviation fuel.

I think we have to remember people live in those towns, and this isn't necessarily a question of net zeros coming along and ruining everybody's livelihoods. I think it's sort of a neglect of what do we actually want out of our industrial strategy and these industrial towns that no government for quite a long time, I mean, including going back to previous Labour governments during the years of Conservative governments that we had, it's sort of a cross-party thing. Nobody's wanted to face up to the fact that

The industries of the past need to move into the future and it's complicated and it's nuanced but i don't think it needs to be so black and white political in the way that it is currently being made out to be you know so the mental question of what brishin wants to be exactly and what do we owe to these former industrial communities.

And I don't think it's that hard of a question to answer. I think this steel strategy, we've been waiting on it for years and years and years, how hard can it be if the government's able to say, oh, we'll do another commission on social care. Governments love to do commissions and strategies and things like that. Why are we waiting on one for steel?

My thanks to Megan Kenyon, Sam Alvis and all the guests who spoke to Megan in Scunthorpe, including Tony Gosling, Martin Foster, Nick Deakin, Andrea Jenkins and Rob Waltham. You can read more in Megan's piece, which we'll put a link to in our show notes. Remember, if you enjoy our podcast, make sure you get the latest episodes as soon as they're released by hitting the follow button or you can give us a review so others can discover us too.

This has been insight from the new statesman. The politics team will be back on Thursday.