Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Tata Steel

Agreed in principle - IF this were the case. But as Howard pointed out, there are significant steel industries in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, all of whom are operating under the same constraints.

Is this genuinely a case of EU restrictions, or is it down to UK Government incompetence?

A good point Tim. It's probably a bit like the Fisheries fiasco......we toe the line to the absolute detriment of our fishing fleets and other EU countries don't.

Precisely!

I wonder how much influence on the "IN.... OUT" referendum this steel industry problem will have?
There is potential for both sides to use it.
Failure giving ammunition to Brexit.
Success for Stay In.
Mind you, what constitutes failure or success?
Closure means failure.
Between that and independant Tata making a keep open decision without political influence is a whole range of scenarios.
The bottom line is that closures will devastate the localities affected, and devastate is an accurate description.
I can see some political expediency coming in to give short term "success".
Just think...if the UK steel industry collapses then who will pick up the business?
Countries with a steel industry to absorb the capacity, both within and outsise the EU.
Will the EU back the UK or not?
I will wait and see.

The Daily Mash, as always, has nailed it:

"STEELWORKERS can make a good living if they retrain as male strippers, David Cameron has announced."

"THE business secretary has confirmed that being dependent on China for steel, energy and all other products is a flawless long-term plan. "

And best of all:

THE government has confirmed there is absolutely nothing it can do to save the non-London-based steel industry.

Amid the prospect of thousands of redundancies, the business secretary said he wishes there was something he could do.

Sajid Javid added: “Tragically, the industry has been hit by a perfect storm of being in the provinces, traditionally supporting Labour and not being financial services.

“Add that to us not wanting to do anything that might offend our new Chinese friends, and there’s absolutely nothing we are prepared to do.

“If only these plants manufactured something useful, like insurance derivatives supported by credit default swaps, then we’d gladly go billions into debt for them.

“But steel? What’s that even for?"

The cost to the treasury of putting these people out of work will be huge. But not £1 mill a day of course.

Equally if Tata close the sites the clean up costs will be high.

One thing you should bear in mind. Steel manufacture is a very high fixed costs business. Around 80% fixed in fact, which means that if demand falls below 90 % of capacity , the business makes a huge loss. If its full to the brim it makes a huge profit.

When I left university and joined the steel industry, the 13 existing british companies were being nationalised. Of those 13 only one, the United Steel Companies, was making a small profit. The rest were loss making and one of them was so much a loss maker that the government hadnt succeeded in selling it off in the previous de- nationalisation.

In my time in the industry we had periods of high demand and huge profits. We also had periods of low demand and losses of over a million per day. We also went down from over 200, 000 employees ot 35000 without dropping a tonne of output.

This pattern of huge losses and huge profits doesnt sit at all well with a capitalist market economy as we are now seeing.

And now it turns out that the EU wanted to do exactly this - but their attempts to do so were blocked by Cameron as he wanted to toady to the Chinese!

Tim, a good point. The thread has drifted from support for the UK steel industry to blaming its demise on the EU. Blaming Brussels for all that goes wrong has become something of a past-time for Britain and I fear that on the morning after Brexit the country will wake up and find that all that is wrong is still wrong. And nobody to blame Last time I looked the Austrian specialist steel maker VA was doing rather well. And last time I looked it was still in the EU. I don't want that to sound smug because the closure of Tata steel will hurt lots of good hard working people who will need more than someone to blame. EU regional development funds for example.