The battle to keep British Steel's Scunthorpe plant open continues apace following Saturday's news that legislation was passed allowing the British Government to have control over the facility and, therefore, the fate of its two blast furnaces.

"Britain in blast chance saloon" screamed the headline on today's Metro newspaper as news outlets report that the much-needed raw materials to keep the blast furnaces working are in the UK.

Earlier reports had suggested that a ship was 30 miles off the Scunthorpe coast and presumably it contained the vital raw materials, it's all a little vague, but let's thank our lucky stars that the ingredients for making steel are now in the country otherwise we might have been the only G7 nation without its own steel industry and that would have been a sorry state of affairs.

What we do know is that Jingye Group, the Chinese owner of British Steel – following a deal struck with Boris Johnson's Government in 2019 – had stopped ordering the raw materials needed to keep the blast furnaces going and was prepared to let them stop running, it has been claimed. Had this happened, 2,700 jobs would have been lost overnight and the UK would have effectively lost its ability to produce virgin steel. Remember: Tata Steel UK's blast furnaces have already ceased to be as the company works towards the development of an electric steelmaking facility in Port Talbot.

The British Government is believed to be looking for a buyer for British Steel while questions are being asked as to why the former Tory party under Boris Johnson's leadership was willing to sell a strategic business to China.

Jingye Group paid £24 million for British Steel. Back then the only alternative was liquidation. Jingye had been the only bidder.

There is plenty of irony in the air too, the first being that with China dumping unwanted steel on foreign markets, like the UK, causing havoc for home-grown steelmakers like British Steel, it seems ironic that the company running British Steel is Chinese.

Second, Green Party MP Ellie Chowns has stated that steel was integral to the "green industrial transformation" probably forgetting that steel production alone accounts for between 7-9% of CO2 emissions globally; and let's not forget that the steel industry globally is in the process of getting its house in order. Decarbonization, of course, is another story altogether.

According to the Metro newspaper in the UK, the Royal Navy may be used to escort the much-needed coking coal shipment into Scunthorpe, the idea being that a naval escort would ensure its arrival without it being intercepted or redirected.

In the same newspaper there are claims that protesters at the site managed to stop Chinese executives entering the plant. Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union said the worry was some form of industrial vandalism or even sabotage.

Stoking that fire was Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, a right wing political party. The Metro reports that Farage was 100% certain that Jingye Group bought British Steel in order to kill it off.

The British Government's business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is quoted as saying that Jingye Group didn't operate in the kind of rational way he had expected a company to operate in a market economy, and added that it might not be sabotage, but it might be neglect.

This is an ongoing story and we will keep you updated as things unfold.

Source: BBC, Metro newspaper.