Nationalising the essentials is 'common sense'

And it looks as if there will be little opposition to nationalisation, which is widely expected to be the next step in the government’s plan to ensure the UK's last two blast furnaces survive.

Owners Jingye want to close the furnaces, putting 2,700 jobs at risk. But that would leave the UK without any capacity to make virgin steel, which is essential for key infrastructure such as rail tracks.

The steel plant at Scunthorpe is set to be nationalised in order to save the UK's last to blast furnaces. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images | Getty Images

If blast furnaces are allowed to cool, the metal in them solidifies, making them hugely expensive to restart. Yet Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds says owners Jingye were not only failing to order the necessary raw materials for the furnaces but also selling off existing supplies needed to keep them going.

Workers were so concerned the company was trying to sabotage the plant that they staged a blockade on Saturday morning to stop executives entering the premises as MPs gathered at Westminster to pass the emergency bill.

Steel nationalisation has not always been so popular - indeed the industry has had quite a history. Clement Attlee's Labour government took it into state control in 1951, but the Tories reversed that two years later. Labour's Harold Wilson renationalised it in 1967 and Margaret Thatcher privatised it in 1988.

After ten years the privatised company merged with a Dutch steel producer to become Corus, which was then taken over by India's Tata Steel in 2007. Tata sold Scunthorpe in 2016 to a company called Greybull Capital, who rebranded as British Steel, which three years later went into liquidation and Jingye bought the plant.

Nationalisation seems the right move to safeguard an essential industry at a time of international uncertainty. But it prompts inevitable questions about why similar action was not taken for the steel plant in Port Talbot and for Scotland’s last oil refinery at Grangemouth.

The government says Grangemouth is not comparable - it may be Scotland’s last oil refinery, but it’s not the UK’s - and that it has stepped in with £200m from the National Wealth Fund for the long-term future of the site, albeit not as a refinery.

But Brian Leishman, Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, wants Grangemouth nationalised to maintain refinery operations at least until the new energy industries of the future are ready. He says: "Key essentials that are vital to the day-to-day running and security of a nation should be under government control, that is common sense.”

And it’s worth noting there’s strong public support for public ownership of the railway, Royal Mail and electricity too.