For many years I would have gladly paid the BBC $20/mo for some way to legally watch Top Gear and Doctor Who. That's it, just two shows and I'll give you more than I give Netflix. They never offered a single legal mechanism available to US citizens, so, well.....don't admit to crimes on the internet and all that.
The BBC will be a zombie in 10 years unless they stop being emotionally driven and sort out their funding.
People say that it's subject to complaints of bias from both sides of the spectrum, but I've yet to see comparable concrete pro-left examples.
> Laura Kuenssberg
ughh yes so glad that era is behind us. Good riddance.
Presumably a very difference sphere of influence.
If you've a problem with that, take it up with the lawyers.
No, BBC, the government doesn't have money. It costs the net taxpayer that much a day.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
If someone takes something from you by force and spends it, they're spending your money.
> as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use
The government doesn't "let" us use it. If we don't use it (e.g. by swapping services directly) then the government gets annoyed and tries to insert taxable transactions into that direct value swap. It makes us use it.
Richest countries have a lot of government owned companies. USA is just an anomaly because of Chicago school of economy.
This is a common myth spreaded by free market freaks.
Original: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/02/chinese-company-...
https://archive.is/dRQsB#selection-2155.4-2155.79
Choice quote from the article
Mike Parker, the school’s director of marketing, wrote on LinkedIn: “Whatever you read, this isn’t a VAT story. It isn’t a ‘falling rolls, unstoppable decline’ story. The truth is deeper and more complex and, eventually, the truth will out.”I suppose you reap what you sow.
Who needs the Chinese to ruin your country when your own people will happily kill successful companies for the tiniest scrap of profit?
Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
The more I learn about steel, the more I realise it's not one single thing but a whole collection of different families of things, each with different tradeoffs.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-strength_low-alloy_steel#...
A wartime effort has to keep supplies moving daily, or the front collapses.
Whereas the need for vaccines is heavily deferred - your population is already vaccinated in peacetime, and you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war, nor vaccinate new population during one either: that large vaccinated population providing herd immunity gives you a lot of runway for children with less access.
.. what were you doing in 2020?
> you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war
The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been.
Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can fight with the tools of WW2, ships and tanks, rather than a war we don't recognize fought with weapons we don't understand and have no counter for. Or, more likely, simply get bought out at the top. Why fire a missile when you can buy a political party for a mere £5m?
Waiting several years for widespread vaccine availability, and practicing good hygiene and social distancing.
Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.
(And that was just the cost to the USA, not the world as a whole).
Coronavirus wasn't bullseyeing vaccine shipments in the Pacific or taking down air freighters.
EDIT: I mean I don't know why you think this is a catch-22: countries pursue both capabilities, and the UK has a pharmaceutical industry and on shore manufacturing capabilities.
Whereas many industrialized nations are struggling to keep steel making capabilities on shore and running. So why is steel special? Because currently it's the one we're in danger of losing (and much harder to ship globally even if you have allies).
Neither is infantry that's sick with the flu, which may have been a factor in the ending of of WWI.
Tis hard to practice good hygiene and social distancing in the trenches.
If one side had better access to vaccines or access to better vaccines in a conflict during a pandemic, it would be significant, regardless of how the pandemic came about.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...
Very few people would claim that there is no testimony for the lab leak claim, it's simply that relatively few domain scientists support that claim.
I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.
One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.
Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
Enough.
> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.
What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?
So someone with expertise in other non relevant fields is enough? Yet people that have expertise in relevant fields dispute his conclusions and its not relevant somehow?
Not a word yet about your motivation. Huh. You'd think anyone out here demanding others' credentials would lead by presenting their own.
You still haven't offered your own credentials.
on a similar note, medical supplies and logistics are a huge deal for going to war, to handle casualties
Gambler's fallacy will keep striking until we do better, won't it.
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
There's been two world wars and access to or stockpiling of steel has been a critical strategic factor in both.
Most consumable military assets are made from steel, for example and it underpins most machine tools and factory components as well.
Royal Navy.
Its better to pay 5 cents more for a loaf now than pay $20 a loaf with rationing later, or if we went back to granary system possibly getting moldy food.
Right, and where is the iron coming from in the scenario where we can't import steel?
Countries that import large shares of their food and medical supply chains are constantly trying to develop domestic capacity.
Russia has been forced to cannibalize jet planes because sanctions have starved it of spare parts.
Even the US Navy gets its ships built in South Korea now.
Britain's remaining industries are very niche. With a small domestic market, you can't get economies of scale. You have to specialize.
You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.
You wouldn't be able to win the war in your scenario, but you could still do a lot to make sure the other side isn't winning either.
Check out Russia's Black Sea fleet to learn the fate of your navy sitting by your shores.
They might not be taking Kiev for a hundred years, but the fortress belt is well within reach in the next couple of years
If they were to negotiate an end tomorrow, Russia certainly wouldnt be giving up territory in ukraine. i dont see how thats not winning
This.
Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
They need a peace deal but external parties don’t want Ukraine to do this. The same ones lending the money
The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along?
This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.
Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.
And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.
In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.
> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions
So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…
There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.
So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...
> Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.
We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.
The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.
Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.
If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?
Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?
>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West
It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.
Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?
>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys
No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.
Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.
The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.
I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
WW1 changed all that with the tank, the machine guns, the toxic gas, the trench, the air warfare.
That’s not my very objective understanding of Russian history.
Based on? The fact it tried to take Kyiv in the first week? That it's still trying to advance?
If Russia were to collapse tomorrow, they would lose everything, I don't see how that's winning.
Russia can't even keep what it previously took. Crimea is becoming indefensible.
By Russia's own accounting, they lost years ago. It does not matter what the outcome is, Russia has taken massive pain to sustain this war they never planned to sustain. They entirely used up their immense Soviet inheritance, which was something they held in high regard and used to insist made them strong. It's gone now. Used up.
The gas station of Europe can no longer produce sufficient gasoline for internal use. It will take at least months to get that capability back.
They have utterly failed to substitute sanctioned components, having switched back to imported components after their internal substitutions performed so poorly.
Their navy is being taken apart by a country that scuttled it's own navy on day one. Ukraine sunk the flagship of the black sea fleet with supposedly just a few missiles, something which the Moskva by all accounts on paper, should have handled just fine. Except all their craft are in such poor condition that many of the systems on the Moskva were likely just nonfunctional, including defense radars, communications, and anti-missile defenses.
Russia was totally reliant on an American private company for their battlefield communications, and is not coping with the shutdown of their access, which they should have been prepared for long ago. They were also dependent on Discord and Telegram.
Russia is being seriously wounded by a country much smaller than it, which also ostensibly had all the same problems as Russia, like poor soviet doctrine, corruption, a poor economy, and demographic issues.
Russia is failing to compete industrially with a former vassal.
Russia had to import soldiers and ammo from north korea.
Russia's weapons export industry is dead. Nobody wants their trash that has proven terrible on the battlefield. Nobody expects Russia to actually be able to build what they claim to sell anymore.
Russia is so run dry on arms that they couldn't help Venezuela against the US invasion. They sent a single anti air weapon system.
Half a million Russians are dead.
If the war ends today and Russia is allowed to keep all the land it is currently standing on, it still has lost. It's not even a Pyrrhic victory at this point.
Back to "dead men dominate UK politics". In this case, we're trying to refight a war from 70 years ago.
It's like planning for your house burning down V dying. If you're dead you don't really need to worry about the after.
So yes the military plans for everyone but global thermo nuclear war, because there's no point planning for that anyway.
I wouldn't say were planning for the next ww2. Look at the number of tanks we have. If anything were over optimised for helping the US fight insurgencies in the middle east at the expense of being able to fight a high intensity war.
i.e. if you have a lot of financial resources and can buy 1000 ships cheaply for the cost of propping up your steel industry to build 100 ships, should you buy 1000 ships (or the steel needed to build them quickly) to instead?
The UK ran out of both a fair while ago
Cotton was another matter.
Newcastle is proverbially built on top of the stuff.
Although renewable energy sources and electric arc furnaces that consume scrap are preferred these days.
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
If British politicians worship voters who are no longer among the living, it is natural that they do the same to a version of the British economy that has long departed. “There are people in this country who love to talk down our manufacturing,” said Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, while speaking in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) factory in Birmingham. During the 1970s, one in four people worked in manufacturing, like Sir Keir’s dad, who died in 2018. Now fewer than one in ten do.
Manufacturing, a small part of the economy, plays a big role in politics everywhere. Britain is no exception. A speech at a JLR plant has become a rite of passage for any leading politician in recent years. Dead Man’s old job comes first for Britain’s politicos. The lives of workers in Britain’s services economy come second. True, manufacturing’s weak performance after the financial crisis is one reason for Britain’s woeful productivity growth. Yet politicians cling on to a primitive vision of it. “He made things with his hands,” said Sir Keir of his father. That modern manufacturing requires oodles of educated workers is ignored. Living graduates play little role in political discourse beyond politicians moaning that there are too many of them. After all, Dead Man did not attend university. Why should his grandchildren bother?
Domestic steel production is an essential element of being sovereign, as opposed to being the handpuppet of a larger power (like the US).
Same with the iron we'd need to make our own steel.
And a current glut just makes it even cheaper for us to stockpile, vs spending on votes by propping up a failing industry.
The US the other hand is always asking for other countries to bail it out of some mess or other.
https://time.com/archive/6882618/just-how-much-did-the-u-s-h...
That's right: the bald man with nuclear weapons won it back.
And as combs go, it was one with considerable geopolitical significance.
France took an entirely different set of conclusions from Suez.
There’s absolutely nothing the Americans could do about it.
Britain's obsolete Trident subs are manufactured by Lockheed, so if they fall out with Trump they will lose access to spare parts. The replacements aren't due until 2028.
If there was the right Arleigh Burke right next to the submarine (which there wont be), and the captain was insanely paranoid enough to contravene standing rules of engagement to already be prepared for a surprise ally launching a weapon, there's about a 50% chance they could intercept each missile.
But yes, Britain could lose its nuclear deterrent. That’s not going to matter for any conflict which starts in the near future though.
The UK built a lot of refining to use local iron ore and coal deposits. It used those deposits. They are now substantially used up. Subsurface mining is uneconomic, and open mining is politically unthinkable.
There is actually a really high quality government review of the whole subject: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/690b868714b04...
Lots of discussion of moving to EAF/DRI from traditional blast furnaces.
Yes you need artillery and particularly shells. But you are so much more limited by the capacity of your munition factories that how much steel you have would not be an issue. One of the main things you would need for a new munitions factory is trained workers.
The World Wars were wars of mass mobilization and industrial capacity. People went into the first thinking cavalry was important, the second thinking battleships still mattered. My point is I have no idea what the next great war might be like, but thinking the winner will be who chugs out the most tanks in five years may be looking in the rear view mirror.
If you are really interested in this, I highly recommend subscribing to war on the rocks. Their articles and paid podcasts have legit defense industry people publishing studies on this subject. https://warontherocks.com
I am not saying drones are everything. My point is, where is the war in which steel is critical ?
How did self-sufficiency shake out for Europe as a whole during WWII?
Well, yes. But not many of them worship the generation who were mostly responsible for voting in favour of Brexit (60% support among those aged 65 and over at the time of the vote).
I still think some manufacturing is simply strategic, and you should maintain a capability even at a (financial) loss though.
Indeed and ironically most British people refuse to eat the species commonly found in UK waters, e.g. mackerel etc.
Because the Brits are so fussy, most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
Not always (Cod Wars). And our herring catch was once its own industry.
> And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
They thought they'd have a monopoly on those fishing grounds post-Brexit.
It was good for industrial farming, not the farmers themselves, one of the big reasons for Norway refusing to join was the impact it would have on farmers.
https://britishseafishing.co.uk/scottish-black-fish-scandal/
> … rigged scales … secret underground [fish] pipes … extra conveyor belt … allowed up to 70 per cent of their catches to go undeclared
> … spent the money they made through the scam on second homes in Spain and France.
The good news is the USA produces lots of food.
The British chocolate industry was a major employer in some places but has been decimated. British chocolate was certainly not the best in the world but it was better than what it has been turned into in the last few years, thanks to palm oil, international take overs etc.
Like... commercial fishing with a net? Not sport fishing?
But some do sightseeing trips, diving and sports fishing too.
idk if that counts as sport fishing, or sport sexual assault?
Kind of the best European chocolate option, if you want to avoid the Swiss and don't want to buy the premium for pralines is the JD Gross company which is mainly delivering to Lidl.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build Hinkley Point C, or HS2 (projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world btw). The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned.
[...]
The subjects with the biggest staff cuts were social work (-9%), English and classics (both -8%), anthropology (-7%) and linguistics (-6%).
"Universities brought in an estimated £24 billion to the UK economy from abroad in 2022. They provide services (education) to international students who bring money to the institutions from abroad through international fees. These students also bring money to the local economy by spending on goods and services while they are studying"
(presumably there's an attempt to imply that those are bad courses in some way, but you haven't shown your working)
Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).
That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.
This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).
But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.
Yes because the UK is overfinancialised to a ridiculous degree. It has deindustralised in doing so.
>This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
I'd call it more of a major import industry. At the same time your doctors and such are leaving the country.
Besides, if these are so profitable why are they making the cuts you think? Is it that those degrees aren't exactly paying off in an economy that can't consist of HR departments and other PMC's?
"look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US ....
Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workforce and space the US could only ever provide the capacity equivalent to one Chinese manufacturing town of which the Chinese have dozens.
British thinking seems to be that because we won the Opium War we should just expect a country with 20 times our population and a vast land area to be poorer, both per capita and in total, than our island, forever.
China's rise comes because it acquired, from inauspicious beginnings, competence at planning an economy.
Britain's decline relative to China comes because it is a democracy - which is to say, vacillating.
Britain has been particularly callow over the part decade, because we indulged ourselves in a bunfight about Brexit to the exclusion of all other concerns. This created a purge of ministerial talent and a sequence of governments primarily occupied with propping themselves up. Elections have been fought on Get Brexit Done and I Would Have A Pint With That Man, not on policy.
The entire edifice is deeply stupid, but it is a stupidity orthogonal to questions of industrial policy. Ministers haven't been in post long enough to reveal any strategy about such.
In a microcosm, the compulsory land purchases were done for HS2 and it was as on-track as infrastructure projects get, when Sunak cancelled half of it, writing off the sunk costs but crippling the long-term value of the project. Meanwhile, China laid more track than the test of the world combined, because it has the will to make large long-term investments.
Ok, being generous and accepting your point at face value ....
What about the people staffing those manufacturing cities ? Is the state creating them too ?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that – at most – the US could "find" 200,000 people for new manufacturing plants.
Sounds about right to me, no ?
I think even with a generous mind the US would struggle to "find" much more than that, let alone getting to or exceeding 1 million which is the value you would need for seriously thinking about >1 manufacturing city.
And willing to work long hours at the minimum-wage rates required for US-based manufacturing ....
P.S. 18-25 and 54+ ... its actually 16–25 and 54+ I don't think you'll find many 16–18 year olds biting your arm off for a job in manufacturing either...
Chinese-scale manufacturing cities in the US at $36/hr ? Yeah, that ... ain't happening.
and there isnt a lack of people that would accept working in one of said manufacturing towns for 10 years or something to get US citizenship?
If manufacturing was a serious problem, the US could definitely solve that problem too.
Are you confusing the lack of effective interventions with "neglect"? Nearly every administration in the past decade had some sort of an industrial policy, but even though they failed to bring manufacturing back to britain, that doesn't mean "neglect". It just means the forces of globalization is too strong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial_stance_of_The_Econom...
They're pro free trade against government intervention. That's not the same as "making things ... is anathema to them". They're for planning reform in uk, to help build infrastructure and homes, for instance.
As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.
Maintaining the Wikipedia page is part of what any PR/reputation management agency does.
It's not at all surprising that they're hostile to the idea of a nation doing anything to take its fate into its own hands when it comes to supply chains etc.
There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay" themselves to live in their own houses. So as housing prices go up, so does imputed rent. House prices have increasingly become the best vehicle for investment funds because the returns are esentially protected. But none of that produces anything.
The UK in particular has been described as buy-to-let economy.
It doesn't have to be this way. If you limit property speculation then capital will find something else productive to do, like manufacturing. Dish rags like The Economist present it as inevitable that Western nations become financialized. It's simply not true. Look at Germany. Also look at the fact that Germany greatly limits the collaterialization and speculation on property. That's not an accident.
[1]: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/02/14/10-or-gdp-is-...
So you live in your fully owned flat, pretend to rent it to yourself and then pay income taxes on that amount. The point is your government can make this "fake" value very real.
Luckily we recently voted to abolish this tax so it will be gone in some years. This tax was introduced as an emergency measure in ww1.
But, the issue is about capacity. Steel and metals generally are a core part of the UK economy. Yes we could just buy it all in from outside, but when geopoltics intervenes it leaves us high and dry (see natural gas, chemical production, wire making, transformer making, etc etc)
If we end up in a war, which seems fairly reasonable, then we need to have access to a manufacturing, not only prototypes, but large scale manufacturing. we need not only the machines, but the people, experience and pipelines to keep that working.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
1018 is 1018 wherever it was made
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
Is this supposed to be referring to the US? Because as far as I know USA has never really exported much steel to the UK at all. It's an importer of British steel.
Maybe it's referring to European allies? Or South Korea?
(British Steel's predecessor was itself a nationalisation effort in the 60s.)
1951 - Nationalised by Attlee (Labour)
1953 - Re-privatised by Churchill (Conservative)
1967 - Nationalised again by Wilson (Labour)
1988 - Privatised again by Thatcher (Conservative)
1999 - Allowed to merge with Dutch Hoogovens into Corus by Blair (Labour)
2007 - Allowed to be sold to Tata Steel by Blair (Labour)
2016 - Tata allowed to sell to Greybull Capital by Cameron (Conservative)
2020 - Takeover by Chinese Jingye under Johnson (Conservative)
I worked there for three years in the mid 90s.
Personally, I think it should have been left alone after 1951.
But it is arguable whether ideologically driven militant unions would have destroyed it in the 1970s and 1980s.
Instead the “Economic incentives” go to the Chinese owners who then learn that Americans are not interested in working in a sweatshop and instead rely on third parties to supply them with illegal workers and engage in white collar crime.
I’m suspicious of “re-industrialization” pushes because everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s resulted in at best a foreign company given massive tax breaks to create a few hundred low paid button pusher jobs and maybe a handful of better paying technician jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_Kingdom_bank_rescu...
Numbers wise it was ~ 1.6 million tonne per annum in a global market that demands ~ 20 million tonne per annum, as a smaller producer in Tasmania with other factors dragging down it wasn't competitive with South Africa, Gabon, and Ghana.
Australia’s only manganese smelter to close, administrators say - https://www.mining.com/web/australias-only-manganese-smelter...
The question is, does that actually mean there is no way to get a smelter up and running in the event of a critical need within a useful timeframe.
Bear in mind, right now today, Australia has multiple shuttered lithium production sites that went up in anticipation of a much greater battery demand than actually occurred, and have since been shuttered. In a similar manner the same is true for other mineral supply chains.
The link to mining.com was a nod to the historic ebb and flow of Australian exploration / production and the kinds of things that get hashed out at the Diggers and Dealers mining forums.
In terms of "critical resources" - we have them in the ground, and we have a lot of smelting technology that we can draw on / repurpose.
What Australia does lack, for now, is next level up processing - eg: hard rock lithium spodumene concentrate processing, currently outsourced to China and Malaysia, only recently barely begun here.
How do you get the very bespoke equipment from overseas if supply chains are being attacked?
Where do you get the designers and operational staff, bearing in mind the industry might have been closed for a while and all prior talent has retired or died?
What's the risk of above vs the government subsidising a plant to keep it operational and known good state?
For manganese ore concentration and binding with carbon?? Ball mills, acid washing, screening, anodes, et al. are 'bespoke' now?
Look, there are big speciality bits which you can order in from overseas, fabricate locally, or retrieve from "stashed one over there" yards.
When existing processing plants are "scrapped" that usually means that beams, catwalks, and all manner of things are crushed and melted down - but it also means that motors, crucibles, linings, etc. are sold on (usually within Australia), or stored and eventually refurbished and sold or reused.
> to keep it operational and known good state?
Is it? It's been going for a while and no one was interested in stepping in due to economics and clean-up issues: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-17/future-liberty-bell-b...
Some might take the approach of suggesting a partial teardown / refit to be more Norwegian in its carbon consumption: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592552...
One thing that I, personally, am not overly concerned about would be a long lasting critical shortage of ferromanganese production ability in Australia.
If the demand / desire is there then we have the resources and in-country skills to step up and make it happen.
We are, as a country, aiming too low on what we can do with mineral resources and charging other countries / non-Australian companies far too little for the privilege of extracting our "wealth" / assets and flogging them on overseas.
The mining super profits tax, franking credits, and similar failed reforms benefited only the top 1% of 1% of Australians, yet people voted against them.
Hopefully the recent negative gearing and trust changes stick.
[1] https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/iron-ore/repo...