IF only Britain had its own coal reserves.
How much easier it would be for the Government’s mad scramble to keep our last two blast furnaces alight and avoid losing our ability to produce virgin steel.
Britain was once world’s pre-eminent industrial power… now we’re a laughing stock[/caption]
When it comes to undermining Britain’s credibility no one has more form than Miliband[/caption]
But hang on, we do have coal reserves. We have hundreds of years’ worth, in fact.
It is just that we have chosen to “leave it in the ground”, as environmental activists like to put it, hence the need to ship coking coal thousands of miles from Japan.
It is a race against time because the furnaces cannot be allowed to go cold.
If they do, the slag in them will solidify and that will be the end.
It gets worse — it was the present government that delivered the coup de grace to a project which could have produced coking coal from a mine in Cumbria.
After plans were defeated in a High Court challenge by environmental activists, Climate Secretary Ed Miliband refused to back the project, saying “the UK cannot claim to be a climate leader whilst opening a new coal mine”.
Doing so, he said, would “undermine our credibility both at home and abroad”.
Sorry, but when it comes to undermining Britain’s credibility no one has more form than Miliband.
Other countries must snigger at the sight of him on his high horse (or, more usually, a business class seat on a jet), preaching about climate change while Britain’s heavy industry is allowed to go to the wall.
One of Miliband’s complaints about the Cumbrian coal mine was that 85 per cent of the coal would be exported. But since when has exporting goods been a problem?
In any case, that would still have left 15 per cent which might have kept the Scunthorpe blast furnaces alight.
Miliband, together with his Conservative predecessors, did the same with Britain’s nascent fracking industry.
They squashed it, on the grounds that fossil fuels were yesterday’s source of energy and gas would not be needed in our glorious wind and solar-powered future.
But now even Miliband accepts we will still need to burn gas to keep the lights on, even if he could reach his 2030 target for decarbonising 95 per cent of the national grid.
We are losing our chemical industry, too, killed off by carbon levies and have the highest commercial electricity prices in the world.
Our industrial policy — or lack of one — has become a national embarrassment.
National embarrassment
It is all the sadder when you consider that Britain was the original industrial nation. We were not just any old steel-making nation, either.
It was Henry Bessemer, from a Huguenot family settled in London, who invented the modern steel-making process.
In the 1870s Britain was the biggest steel producer in the world, accounting for 40 per cent of the world’s output.
Even in the 1960s Britain was the fifth largest steel producer in the world. We are no longer even in the top 20.
We are about to lose our virgin steel industry altogether, and the worst thing is that, until ministers finally awoke to the crisis last week, the Government seemed to regard the industry’s demise as an achievement.
The future, it claimed, belonged to low-carbon electric arc furnaces — although all they can do is recycle steel.
All that would be achieved by losing our blast furnaces is to make us more reliant on imports.
That would help reduce Britain’s territorial carbon emissions but would do nothing to reduce global emissions.
In fact, they would rise because we would have to transport steel from afar.
The Government gloated, too, about the closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Leics, last autumn.
True, coal is a filthy way to generate electricity.
Not only do coal power stations produce around twice as much carbon dioxide, unit for unit, as gas plants, but they produce large quantities of sulphur dioxide, which used to cause acid rain before the chimneys were fitted with “scrubbers” to remove it.
But coal power was also cheap and convenient, helping to power the industrial revolution, which transformed life around the globe.
In contrast to gas, it is easy to store. Remember how Britain managed to keep the lights on during the 11-month miners’ strike in 1984/85?
Decaying industries
That was thanks to stockpiles of coal at power stations. Now, we can store less than two weeks’ worth of gas.
The Government boasts of closing coal plants but it has not replaced them with adequate alternatives. Wind and solar certainly are not doing the job.
Last year, Britain imported a record 13.7 per cent of the electricity it consumed.
It was not so long ago that Britain was wholly self-sufficient in electricity.
Now we are relying on neighbouring countries to generate our power for us.
Once the world’s pre-eminent industrial power, we have become a laughing stock.
We are not the only country, of course, to have a rustbelt of decaying industries which have been savaged by global competition.
The decline of the US steel industry is one of the main reasons behind Donald Trump’s declaration of trade war.
But we have certainly been leading the world in deliberately trying to close down our industries.
That the Government has finally realised the harm it has been doing is little consolation.