The UK steel industry is facing chaos at the moment, with calls for the government to re-nationalise British Steel. It’s a state of affairs almost anyone could have predicted, because privatisation is a scam, and it always leads to worse products and services, and it always ends up costing the taxpayer a fortune.
Still, there are those who try to defend it.
One person spewing pro-privatisation talking points this Sunday was the BBC‘s Laura Kuenssberg:
#bbclaurak: "You've said on the record it is likely this company will be nationalised. Have you done an assessment of how much that would cost the tax payer?"
Jonathan Reynolds: "The value of the company is zero. It has no market value in that sense"
Now do water. pic.twitter.com/lvvnHtqB6b
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) April 13, 2025
Anti-British Steel nationalisation propaganda
So, why is it propaganda to ask how much it will cost to re-nationalise a privatised industry such as British Steel?
Because – as we’ve already stated – nationalisation actually saves money in most instances.
As the pro-public ownership group We Own It report:
- Public ownership of water will save £2.5 billion a year – investing this will reduce leakage levels by a third.
- Public ownership of energy networks will save £3.7 billion a year – enough to buy 876 new offshore wind turbines.
- Public ownership of rail will save £1 billion a year – enough to buy 100 miles of new railway track.
- Public ownership of buses will save £506 million a year – enough to buy 1,356 new electric buses.
- Public ownership of Royal Mail will save £171 million a year – enough to open 342 new Crown Post Offices with post banks.
Kuenssberg’s question is like asking how much it will cost to put out a fire at a bank. Sure, in the short-term we would have to pay the firefighters to tackle the blaze, but in the long term we wouldn’t setting fire to massive heaps of cash for no good reason.
And yet this is always the question that gets asked about nationalisation.
To be fair, the situation with British Steel isn’t as clean cut as with the services above, because the globalised economy has made it cheaper to import steel than to produce it. But even with that being the case, there are important things to consider:
- The globalised economy we’ve become reliant on has begun to wobble, showing we were wrong to assume it could be relied on forever.
- We can’t treat the country like a ‘growth-at-all-costs’ business which doesn’t plan beyond next quarter. Ultimately, we have to balance the cost of maintaining our steel industry with the risk to jobs, security, and the economy which come with allowing fly-by-night foreign companies to run and dump our vital national industries.
You can’t tell us it’s cheaper and more productive to repeatedly go through this doom cycle of selling industries like British Steel; paying to prop them up; paying to renationalise them, and then selling them off again. I mean, you can tell us that, but we’re going to assume you’re saying that because you’re being paid by the people who want to rinse the country for more money.
Kuenssberg did publish an article which goes into some of the finer detail, but it’s telling she’d use the interview as an opportunity to focus on the key propaganda point of the privatisation fetishists.
U-turns on U-turns
Keir Starmer has gone from presenting himself as a vaguely left-leaning politician who was pro-nationalisation to a very right-wing prime minister with hyper nationalist tendencies. The interesting thing is that in this moment either incarnation of Starmer would likely do the same thing – renationalise British Steel.
We fully acknowledge that if Starmer does it now, it will be because he wants to sabre rattle about national security for the benefit of the flag-shagging knuckle draggers who are going to vote for Reform regardless of how many Union Jacks he drapes himself in. At the same time, if we renationalise one industry, the case to renationalise everything gets that much easier.
As such, expect to see more figures in the British establishment standing up for their corporate pals on the Westminster supper circuit.
Featured image via BBC
