Union members lost confidence in Jingye Group a long time ago

There has been a steady stream of comments about Jingye's ownership of British Steel and none of them make for good reading.

The British Government's business secretary Jonathan Reynolds has warned that there is now a 'high trust bar' for allowing Chinese firms to invest in strategic British industries (like steel). Jingye has been accused of acting irrationally and not in a manner expected of a company operating within a market economy.

Reynolds has suggested that Chinese firms are excluded from 'very sensitive' industries (again, like steel) and such comments have made many observers wonder what the government of Boris Johnson was thinking when it sold British Steel for £23 million to Jingye back in 2019. Sadly, of course, there were no other takers and presumably, rather than nationalise the business, ideology stood in the way and here we are six years later, almost without a virgin steel industry in the UK.

Was Jingye Group trying to shut the plant down? Former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, commonly known as IDS, said he wouldn't be surprised.

Protesters at the plant in Scunthorpe stopped Jingye executives from entering the plant for fear of sabotage. Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union said they were legitimately worried about foul play.

Jonathan Reynolds, however, was keen to keep a lid on it and said it might have been neglect, but Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said he was 100% certain that Jingye Group bought the company with the sole intention of closing it down. He said the plant should be nationalised...and that's rare coming from a right wing politician. The Tories say nationalisation should be a last resort.

But by far the most damaging comments against Jingye Group came today from Alasdair McDiarmid, assistant general secretary of the Community Union, the steelmakers' union.

“It’s a huge relief that this crucial and overdue shipment of coke has arrived at Immingham this morning. We thank the Prime Minister and Business Secretary for their decisive actions to secure the raw materials required to keep the blast furnaces running," said McDiarmid.

“Our members lost confidence in Jingye a long time ago, and recent events have proven the Chinese were never a fit and proper owner for a strategically critical business like British Steel. It beggars belief, but we now know Jingye were starving our furnaces of raw materials so they could end steelmaking at Scunthorpe and feed our rolling mills from their operations in China," he said.

"Jingye’s disgraceful actions, if they had succeeded, would have cost us thousands of quality jobs and severely compromised the UK’s economic and national security. The Government’s bold intervention to seize control of British Steel headed off this profound threat to our country, and we look forward to working with the Government, and the newly-installed UK management team, to safeguard jobs and the long-term future of Scunthorpe steelmaking.”

But what about those raw materials? According to news reports they've arrived and more are on the way. That ship spotted 30 miles off the coast from Scunthorpe by government officials with brass telescopes must be steaming west towards the plant as I write this and there's another shipment out there somewhere that might need a Royal Navy Escort.

Let's hope that Jonathan Reynolds' high trust bar is made from British steel!