It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.
You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.
Food tends to be a lot easier to produce, and many countries do often subsidize their food production, as well as have mercantilistic policies to ensure food production is kept locally.
Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
> There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
The more I learn about steel, the more I realise it's not one single thing but a whole collection of different families of things, each with different tradeoffs.
One big thing about steel is actually traceability, certain industries require very specific steels. One example that always comes to mind is Sheffield Forgemaster's who are one of the few places in the world that can make absolutely gargantuan sized castings for nuclear reactors and marine equipment
Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis.
A wartime effort has to keep supplies moving daily, or the front collapses.
Whereas the need for vaccines is heavily deferred - your population is already vaccinated in peacetime, and you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war, nor vaccinate new population during one either: that large vaccinated population providing herd immunity gives you a lot of runway for children with less access.
> Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis
.. what were you doing in 2020?
> you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war
The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been.
Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can fight with the tools of WW2, ships and tanks, rather than a war we don't recognize fought with weapons we don't understand and have no counter for. Or, more likely, simply get bought out at the top. Why fire a missile when you can buy a political party for a mere £5m?
Which does not change the fact that the pandemic was a peacetime crisis where it was possible but not practical to keep most systems running if needed.
Coronavirus wasn't bullseyeing vaccine shipments in the Pacific or taking down air freighters.
EDIT: I mean I don't know why you think this is a catch-22: countries pursue both capabilities, and the UK has a pharmaceutical industry and on shore manufacturing capabilities.
Whereas many industrialized nations are struggling to keep steel making capabilities on shore and running. So why is steel special? Because currently it's the one we're in danger of losing (and much harder to ship globally even if you have allies).
> Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.
Neither is infantry that's sick with the flu, which may have been a factor in the ending of of WWI.
Tis hard to practice good hygiene and social distancing in the trenches.
If one side had better access to vaccines or access to better vaccines in a conflict during a pandemic, it would be significant, regardless of how the pandemic came about.
> relatively few domain scientists support that claim
I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.
One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.
> What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?
Enough.
> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.
What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?
So someone with expertise in other non relevant fields is enough? Yet people that have expertise in relevant fields dispute his conclusions and its not relevant somehow?
Not your credentials specifically, but Steven Quay. Cursory search suggest he's not an expert in relevant fields, but does have a book about lab leak theory. Immediately suspicious as there are a lot of scientists that turn to grifting in areas that were not relevant to their expertise.
I don't much care what the man does with his free time. I'm more interested in the veracity of his statements. On that front he supplies copious references to peer reviewed research by numerous others and primary sources. Character assassination is for folks who can't argue on the merits.
> On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
Gambler's fallacy will keep striking until we do better, won't it.
The food example, is the exact reason for large farming subsidies in the European Union. These were implemented as a founding initiative, due to the experience of food shortages during the second world war.
A great number of things could be considered critical. Due to the nature of when access could be cut off, the main thing countries likely worry about being able to access, is things humans need to stay alive, and things needed to wage war.
Farming subsidies are one of the most criticized parts of the EU. My comment isn't in support of it. But even so, subsidy is quite different from compulsory purchase. The question is: why is steel special. Not in a no-action-vs-some-action way, but why so aggressive?
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
For lots of reasons but if you're the UK and you're honest with yourself and you are only allowed to pick exactly one reason that steel is absolutely critical?
Farming subsidies are the only way to prevent famine, the granary system sort of works, but regularly resulted in shortages and famines throughout every empire in history. Even not accounting for longer term climate trends, yield due to weather can vary up to 30% in a year, so it only makes sense to pay for a bit of over production so in the event of a couple bad years your food output is merely break even, and not 70% of needs.
Its better to pay 5 cents more for a loaf now than pay $20 a loaf with rationing later, or if we went back to granary system possibly getting moldy food.
Recycling steel uses by and large the same industrial sites as making new steel. Most new steel has some amount of recycled steel mixed in, the trick is getting the ratios of various types of scrap right
Obviously there are a lot of important things you need to keep a country running, but steel is a key input a in a huge number of very important sectors (infrastructure, military, automotive etc.) so having some ability to produce your own steel seems a sensible hedge.
Yep, same can be said of manufacturing capability in general. If you don't have a manufacturing base then inevitably when there's a war you may find yourself unable to build defense components.
Let's imagine a hypothetical symmetrical war between two modern countries. One can disable the other's satellites and maintain their own fleet. The other can't get access to any third parties' satellites.
You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.
In a defensive war, a steel navy sitting in spitting distance of your shores and an army of steel tanks will still do a lot to keep the enemy at bay. And you can swap the tank turrets for Gatling guns on some of your newly produced tanks to help against drones
You wouldn't be able to win the war in your scenario, but you could still do a lot to make sure the other side isn't winning either.
If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave. A ton of casualties and further international isolation aren’t really worth the middling gains Russia could negotiate for peace today. Which is probably one of the reasons they still haven’t, sunk cost fallacy and all that.
> If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave.
This.
Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning.
Russia is not only on the precipice of giving up territory in Ukraine, it's likely to give up so much more because its ability to function as a country is being systematically destroyed.
The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along?
The benefit of war is almost never worth the cost. It just tends to scale up from repeated mutual miscalculations. For instance WW1 started from a Bosnian Serb assassinating the Austro-Hungarian heir and the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it. Everybody would have certainly turned back the clock there if they could, even moreso given that "The War to End All Wars" directly set the stage for WW2. But that doesn't mean that the Allied Powers didn't win WW1.
This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.
Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.
Would you say that Austria-Hungary choosing to outright invade Serbia because the assassin was a Bosnian Serb who might have had some backing from the government, was reasonable? Or was that a land grab? And when when Russia joins Serbia was it solely an action of obligation or because they thought they might be able to get a piece of Austria-Hungary? And similarly when Germany jumps in seeing they can now shift the balance back towards Austria-Hungary, and so on.
And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.
In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.
Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic.
> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions
So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…
Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail.
There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.
So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.
> Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.
They weren't. Ukraine is still nowhere near getting a membership action plan, which is the formal start of membership negotiations.
We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.
The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.
Doesn't matter now. Ukraine will never join NATO. Poland will be happy to veto their entry, and will be happy having Ukraine be the buffer state that can sacrifice its youth for the sake of Europe. What Zelensky did with honoring the UPA was irredeemable.
Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.
>In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.
If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?
Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?
>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West
It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.
Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?
>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys
No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.
Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.
The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3 days came from the West, not Russia. [1] And it's highly improbable that "we" actually even believed that. Wars don't ever end in 3 days, and Ukraine had been pumped full of arms for years, had multiple cities that been heavily fortified for war, and an army approaching a million men, large numbers of of "ultra nationalists" itching for a fight, and all of this before all men of "fighting age" (up to 60) were locked in the country and started being forced into the military. Why we were putting out nonsensical rhetoric that could serve no viable purpose other than to try to entice an invasion (and as such would normally be classified) is a question with only one apparent answer.
The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.
I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.
Russia's explicit and communicated goals for this war were utterly failed by day four of the invasion. Arguably they lost within hours when they failed to take Hostemel airport.
By Russia's own accounting, they lost years ago. It does not matter what the outcome is, Russia has taken massive pain to sustain this war they never planned to sustain. They entirely used up their immense Soviet inheritance, which was something they held in high regard and used to insist made them strong. It's gone now. Used up.
The gas station of Europe can no longer produce sufficient gasoline for internal use. It will take at least months to get that capability back.
They have utterly failed to substitute sanctioned components, having switched back to imported components after their internal substitutions performed so poorly.
Their navy is being taken apart by a country that scuttled it's own navy on day one. Ukraine sunk the flagship of the black sea fleet with supposedly just a few missiles, something which the Moskva by all accounts on paper, should have handled just fine. Except all their craft are in such poor condition that many of the systems on the Moskva were likely just nonfunctional, including defense radars, communications, and anti-missile defenses.
Russia was totally reliant on an American private company for their battlefield communications, and is not coping with the shutdown of their access, which they should have been prepared for long ago. They were also dependent on Discord and Telegram.
Russia is being seriously wounded by a country much smaller than it, which also ostensibly had all the same problems as Russia, like poor soviet doctrine, corruption, a poor economy, and demographic issues.
Russia is failing to compete industrially with a former vassal.
Russia had to import soldiers and ammo from north korea.
Russia's weapons export industry is dead. Nobody wants their trash that has proven terrible on the battlefield. Nobody expects Russia to actually be able to build what they claim to sell anymore.
Russia is so run dry on arms that they couldn't help Venezuela against the US invasion. They sent a single anti air weapon system.
Half a million Russians are dead.
If the war ends today and Russia is allowed to keep all the land it is currently standing on, it still has lost. It's not even a Pyrrhic victory at this point.
Is it that they can't work, or that they are too expensive for Russia to field any appreciable amount that won't just make them valuable targets? Its not trivial to produce the hundreds of thousands of rounds you need for each one to be ready.
If there is any nation on earth that is capable of cheaply producing large quantities of simple weapons of war it is the Russians. The issue is not a lack of cheap bullets.
Everyone in this discussion seems to be forgetting Trident as well. There's a lot of assumption the next war will be helpfully similar to WW2, and some sort of reverse sweet spot where we are subject to naval interdiction but will not deploy the strategic nuclear deterrent, and at the same time have enough time to build things, but not things that require any of the rest of the supply chain than steel (I have bad news about the number of ASIC fabs in the UK).
Back to "dead men dominate UK politics". In this case, we're trying to refight a war from 70 years ago.
The absolute worst case is that it's not advantageous/useful at all in the next war to have the capability, but it wouldn't harm you at all if you do have it, it just wouldn't be useful. In every other case, from the worst case all the way up the continuum to the best case, having the capability is beneficial to varying levels of degree.
How many billions have you spent propping up useless industries in the years before the war though? What capacities could have been built with those billions otherwise?
Well if trident gets used then what comes next is irrelevant.
It's like planning for your house burning down V dying. If you're dead you don't really need to worry about the after.
So yes the military plans for everyone but global thermo nuclear war, because there's no point planning for that anyway.
I wouldn't say were planning for the next ww2. Look at the number of tanks we have. If anything were over optimised for helping the US fight insurgencies in the middle east at the expense of being able to fight a high intensity war.
i.e. if you have a lot of financial resources and can buy 1000 ships cheaply for the cost of propping up your steel industry to build 100 ships, should you buy 1000 ships (or the steel needed to build them quickly) to instead?
Steel on its own is inert and useless, you need to retain the entire downstream manufacturing ecosystem that consumes it. Like cars for example, producing steel but letting all your vehicle manufacturers sell off to foreign owners just so you can import BYDs doesn't do you any good.
This reminded me of an article in The Economist published last year, April 2025:
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
If British politicians worship voters who are no longer among the living, it is natural that they do the same to a version of the British economy that has long departed. “There are people in this country who love to talk down our manufacturing,” said Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, while speaking in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) factory in Birmingham. During the 1970s, one in four people worked in manufacturing, like Sir Keir’s dad, who died in 2018. Now fewer than one in ten do.
Manufacturing, a small part of the economy, plays a big role in politics everywhere. Britain is no exception. A speech at a JLR plant has become a rite of passage for any leading politician in recent years. Dead Man’s old job comes first for Britain’s politicos. The lives of workers in Britain’s services economy come second. True, manufacturing’s weak performance after the financial crisis is one reason for Britain’s woeful productivity growth. Yet politicians cling on to a primitive vision of it. “He made things with his hands,” said Sir Keir of his father. That modern manufacturing requires oodles of educated workers is ignored. Living graduates play little role in political discourse beyond politicians moaning that there are too many of them. After all, Dead Man did not attend university. Why should his grandchildren bother?
Half of all steel in the UK is imported anyway, and there are many places to obtain it. Unless the UK goes to war with most of the world at the same time, it’s not going to have trouble getting steel.
Britain's last two territorial conflicts involved the Falklands, and Icelandic fishing ships in the neighborhood of Rockall. I don't recall that third party assistance was required in either dispute, thank you very much.
The US the other hand is always asking for other countries to bail it out of some mess or other.
Did you miss the word "large"? And the UK required significant US assistance during the Falkland Islands war, so apparently you're quite ignorant about history.
The command and control systems are American. The intelligence network is American. The last time the British military acted without US support was Suez. The UK went in on NATO 100%.
France took an entirely different set of conclusions from Suez.
NATO can and probably would shoot them out of the sky using ballistic missile defence. IIRC Britain has a total of 8 missiles.
Britain's obsolete Trident subs are manufactured by Lockheed, so if they fall out with Trump they will lose access to spare parts. The replacements aren't due until 2028.
Are you under some absurd notion that NATO has ballistic missile defense in Russia? Or can magically reach out and intercept a ballistic missile anywhere on the globe?
If there was the right Arleigh Burke right next to the submarine (which there wont be), and the captain was insanely paranoid enough to contravene standing rules of engagement to already be prepared for a surprise ally launching a weapon, there's about a 50% chance they could intercept each missile.
Now check where the inputs to steel production come from.
The UK built a lot of refining to use local iron ore and coal deposits. It used those deposits. They are now substantially used up. Subsurface mining is uneconomic, and open mining is politically unthinkable.
Really? There is a large war going on right now and the key material is chips. Drone don't use a lot of steel, neither do missiles or modern airplanes.
Yes you need artillery and particularly shells. But you are so much more limited by the capacity of your munition factories that how much steel you have would not be an issue. One of the main things you would need for a new munitions factory is trained workers.
The World Wars were wars of mass mobilization and industrial capacity. People went into the first thinking cavalry was important, the second thinking battleships still mattered. My point is I have no idea what the next great war might be like, but thinking the winner will be who chugs out the most tanks in five years may be looking in the rear view mirror.
You can't occupy territory with drones (yet). You will need people and moving people in a drone-infested environment will mean protecting them with armoured vehicles. Yes, these vehicles will need enhancements and other new tech to counter drones, but armoured vehicles aren't going away (MAYBE the tank's days are numbered, though).
If you are really interested in this, I highly recommend subscribing to war on the rocks. Their articles and paid podcasts have legit defense industry people publishing studies on this subject. https://warontherocks.com
It's a myth that battleships didn't matter in WWII. They ended up being critically important in the Pacific Theater for carrier escort and amphibious fire support. They didn't stop mattering until the widespread deployment of guided missiles and other precision munitions.
It’s only possible for Dead Man valorizing politicians to be elected because much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
> much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
Well, yes. But not many of them worship the generation who were mostly responsible for voting in favour of Brexit (60% support among those aged 65 and over at the time of the vote).
I think they do, actually. They just have a disconnect about it. But e.g. removing the triple lock is unpopular not just among those of an age to be affected by it.
This is true, but .. for all retirement planning, you kind of have to assume no-collapse. It's also incoherent to say "the government pays too much attention to retirees" and "I expect to be defrauded by the government when I retire, along with my entire generation, and to be powerless to stop this" at the same time.
Indeed and ironically most British people refuse to eat the species commonly found in UK waters, e.g. mackerel etc.
Because the Brits are so fussy, most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
> most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
Not always (Cod Wars). And our herring catch was once its own industry.
> And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
They thought they'd have a monopoly on those fishing grounds post-Brexit.
The problem for them wasn't the sales, it was the catches. The EU was good for farmers, not so good for fisheries. The EU fishing rules meant multiple countries could fish the same grounds meaning overfishing. The UK was much stricter on net sizes than Spain was.
> The EU was good for farmers, not so good for fisheries.
It was good for industrial farming, not the farmers themselves, one of the big reasons for Norway refusing to join was the impact it would have on farmers.
That seems more a feelings than fact based view. The Norwegian referendum had many reasons, but as for Brexit they were not necessarily based on rational analysis. Norway is nominally independent but in every economic sector, including farming, pretty much integrated with the EU countries.
That is because fishing has multiple other factors. For one, it is a major component of certain towns and villages, so while it isn't important to big cities, it is on the smaller scale in particular areas. It keeps harbours open and is also a draw for tourists, so I would say it has different implications than, say, shoe manufacturing.
The British chocolate industry was a major employer in some places but has been decimated. British chocolate was certainly not the best in the world but it was better than what it has been turned into in the last few years, thanks to palm oil, international take overs etc.
Well since Mondelez night Caburies, Milka, and other major brands across Europe it has slowly been downgrading their quality. So unfortunately not a purely British problem and even more unfortunately an intentional business strategy by a Swiss conglomerate.
Kind of the best European chocolate option, if you want to avoid the Swiss and don't want to buy the premium for pralines is the JD Gross company which is mainly delivering to Lidl.
what a bizarre article, completely disconnected from reality. in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build Hinkley Point C, or HS2 (projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world btw). The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market; AND the popular view of manufacturing (large plant staffed by a large number of men being the dominant employer of a nearby town or city) doesn't look anything like the reality of modern manufacturing (small run boutique high value stuff like satellites and turbines, highly automated and professionalized, relatively small number of employees).
This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned.
[...]
The subjects with the biggest staff cuts were social work (-9%), English and classics (both -8%), anthropology (-7%) and linguistics (-6%).
"Universities brought in an estimated £24 billion to the UK economy from abroad in 2022. They provide services (education) to international students who bring money to the institutions from abroad through international fees. These students also bring money to the local economy by spending on goods and services while they are studying"
(presumably there's an attempt to imply that those are bad courses in some way, but you haven't shown your working)
It's not boutique vs large plant. It's base materials (paper mills, steel smelters, plastic etc) that tend to be low in added value, versus higher up the stack (like your examples) that also tend to be higher in added value.
Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).
That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.
This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).
But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.
>The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market
Yes because the UK is overfinancialised to a ridiculous degree.
It has deindustralised in doing so.
>This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
I'd call it more of a major import industry.
At the same time your doctors and such are leaving the country.
Besides, if these are so profitable why are they making the cuts you think?
Is it that those degrees aren't exactly paying off in an economy that can't consist of HR departments and other PMC's?
> look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it.
"look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US ....
Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workforce and space the US could only ever provide the capacity equivalent to one Chinese manufacturing town of which the Chinese have dozens.
> Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
British thinking seems to be that because we won the Opium War we should just expect a country with 20 times our population and a vast land area to be poorer, both per capita and in total, than our island, forever.
> and the US federally owns tons of land it can create manufacturing cities out of
Ok, being generous and accepting your point at face value ....
What about the people staffing those manufacturing cities ? Is the state creating them too ?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that – at most – the US could "find" 200,000 people for new manufacturing plants.
Sounds about right to me, no ?
I think even with a generous mind the US would struggle to "find" much more than that, let alone getting to or exceeding 1 million which is the value you would need for seriously thinking about >1 manufacturing city.
The US labor force participation rate is currently at a relatively low level. There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.
Then why does my link specifically have a "25-54 Yrs" qualification, and has a totally different shape compared to the first link? The difference between the two is stark, 21.8 percentage points. Do you really think there's that many people willing to work between 18-25 and 54+?
> Do you really think there's that many people willing to work between 18-25 and 54+?
And willing to work long hours at the minimum-wage rates required for US-based manufacturing ....
P.S. 18-25 and 54+ ... its actually 16–25 and 54+ I don't think you'll find many 16–18 year olds biting your arm off for a job in manufacturing either...
The average does not represent the entry level wage, which is closer to minimum wage in some states. Why would you risk losing an appendage in a factory machine if you can fold t-shirts for the same pay?
>in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
Are you confusing the lack of effective interventions with "neglect"? Nearly every administration in the past decade had some sort of an industrial policy, but even though they failed to bring manufacturing back to britain, that doesn't mean "neglect". It just means the forces of globalization is too strong.
The Economist is a mouthpiece for the money power, specifically the banking interests of the Rothschild and Cadbury families. The idea of making money by making things (as opposed to arbitrage) is anathema to them.
They're pro free trade against government intervention. That's not the same as "making things ... is anathema to them". They're for planning reform in uk, to help build infrastructure and homes, for instance.
>As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.
Right, which is why the first part of my comment, before mentioning wikipedia at all is "Source?". Wikipedia might be biased, but it's a good starting point. Likewise, it's very hard to take you seriously when all you can do is complain about how wikipedia is biased/astroturfed, but can't provide any sources to contradict the wikipedia article, yet are willing to take a random commenter at face value.
The economist is pravda for the global globalist class.
It's not at all surprising that they're hostile to the idea of a nation doing anything to take its fate into its own hands when it comes to supply chains etc.
There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay" themselves to live in their own houses. So as housing prices go up, so does imputed rent. House prices have increasingly become the best vehicle for investment funds because the returns are esentially protected. But none of that produces anything.
The UK in particular has been described as buy-to-let economy.
It doesn't have to be this way. If you limit property speculation then capital will find something else productive to do, like manufacturing. Dish rags like The Economist present it as inevitable that Western nations become financialized. It's simply not true. Look at Germany. Also look at the fact that Germany greatly limits the collaterialization and speculation on property. That's not an accident.
In Switzerland this fictional imputed rent is actually extremly real. We have to pay taxes as if it was earned income.
So you live in your fully owned flat, pretend to rent it to yourself and then pay income taxes on that amount. The point is your government can make this "fake" value very real.
Luckily we recently voted to abolish this tax so it will be gone in some years. This tax was introduced as an emergency measure in ww1.
But, the issue is about capacity. Steel and metals generally are a core part of the UK economy. Yes we could just buy it all in from outside, but when geopoltics intervenes it leaves us high and dry (see natural gas, chemical production, wire making, transformer making, etc etc)
If we end up in a war, which seems fairly reasonable, then we need to have access to a manufacturing, not only prototypes, but large scale manufacturing. we need not only the machines, but the people, experience and pipelines to keep that working.
Interesting how they haven't repeated in this article earlier claims that the Chinese purchase of the steelworks was a strategic move to slowly destroy the blast furnaces by letting them cool under pretext of low demand.
Mike Parker, the school’s director of marketing, wrote on LinkedIn: “Whatever you read, this isn’t a VAT story. It isn’t a ‘falling rolls, unstoppable decline’ story. The truth is deeper and more complex and, eventually, the truth will out.”
UK private schools spent decades ingratiating themselves to Eastern European gangsters, Arab tyrants and the scions of Asian oligarchs probably including CCP kids. China-pandering has also undermined university education, although the individual Chinese students tend 5o be okay.
The government is forced to sell steel at a loss, because all the buyers for whom this is a such a vital supply would otherwise buy cheaper imported steel, every single one of them.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
2 things:
a) Government plays a part in the cost of things - especially years of mis-investment around energy generation has sent British prices to the stratosphere and employment taxation levels greater than those 'cheaper' producers.
b) The 'cheaper' producers are still _producers_ and thus have control - if they need to hoard their own supply they will, or if they need to leverage it for some political gain they might.
The government is the only entity which can gain money from running a business at a loss. For example: running trains at a loss will reduce car traffic, thus reducing losses from traffic jams and reducing road maintenance costs. With steel the government can recoup losses from producing cheap steel through steel-dependent services like roadworks, the military, public housing,...
The UK loves to take various infrastructure and industries private and public depending on which government is in power at the moment. See also trains, water, etc
I had not realised UK still had mining for iron ore, but it seems it's even a net exporter [1]. In that case it really makes sense to keep such a strategic industry alive as both the up- and downstream companies would suffer if it's shut down.
The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), which would have provided orders for virgin steel from such furnaces. It's hard to see how this has a happy and sustainable ending.
I assume, ultimately western nations will have to adopt what already exists for agricultural goods for production as well. I am afraid it will end as a per-worker subsidy analog to per-area-of-land for lack of a better metric but in the end, that is what will be necessary if one wants to keep any industrial capabilities.
It wasn't economically feasible, the owners wanted out, no buyers stepped up.
Numbers wise it was ~ 1.6 million tonne per annum in a global market that demands ~ 20 million tonne per annum, as a smaller producer in Tasmania with other factors dragging down it wasn't competitive with South Africa, Gabon, and Ghana.
I can reel off a list of plants being torn down for scrap also.
The question is, does that actually mean there is no way to get a smelter up and running in the event of a critical need within a useful timeframe.
Bear in mind, right now today, Australia has multiple shuttered lithium production sites that went up in anticipation of a much greater battery demand than actually occurred, and have since been shuttered. In a similar manner the same is true for other mineral supply chains.
The link to mining.com was a nod to the historic ebb and flow of Australian exploration / production and the kinds of things that get hashed out at the Diggers and Dealers mining forums.
In terms of "critical resources" - we have them in the ground, and we have a lot of smelting technology that we can draw on / repurpose.
What Australia does lack, for now, is next level up processing - eg: hard rock lithium spodumene concentrate processing, currently outsourced to China and Malaysia, only recently barely begun here.
I guess that's the question - how fast can you build required plants during war time?
How do you get the very bespoke equipment from overseas if supply chains are being attacked?
Where do you get the designers and operational staff, bearing in mind the industry might have been closed for a while and all prior talent has retired or died?
What's the risk of above vs the government subsidising a plant to keep it operational and known good state?
For manganese ore concentration and binding with carbon?? Ball mills, acid washing, screening, anodes, et al. are 'bespoke' now?
Look, there are big speciality bits which you can order in from overseas, fabricate locally, or retrieve from "stashed one over there" yards.
When existing processing plants are "scrapped" that usually means that beams, catwalks, and all manner of things are crushed and melted down - but it also means that motors, crucibles, linings, etc. are sold on (usually within Australia), or stored and eventually refurbished and sold or reused.
So really its all conjecture unless an actual project plan is written up with supply chain sources, and the plan is kept up to date with inventory of items scrapped vs placed in storage and capacity from current importers & manufacturers.
One thing that I, personally, am not overly concerned about would be a long lasting critical shortage of ferromanganese production ability in Australia.
If the demand / desire is there then we have the resources and in-country skills to step up and make it happen.
We are, as a country, aiming too low on what we can do with mineral resources and charging other countries / non-Australian companies far too little for the privilege of extracting our "wealth" / assets and flogging them on overseas.
Unfortunately too many Australians are swayed by scare campaigns and vote against their own interest.
The mining super profits tax, franking credits, and similar failed reforms benefited only the top 1% of 1% of Australians, yet people voted against them.
Hopefully the recent negative gearing and trust changes stick.
one of the most hilarious examples of how the current wh admins false protectionism, in my mind, is the crucible steel bankruptcy in jan/feb 2025.
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
One can argue whether, in abstract, this was a good idea.
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
One more tiny piece of the global system of international order falling apart.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
> There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. [...] nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
Is this supposed to be referring to the US? Because as far as I know USA has never really exported much steel to the UK at all. It's an importer of British steel.
Maybe it's referring to European allies? Or South Korea?
Steel production is on the decline in most first world nations. In case of a large-scale war there simply wouldn't be a lot of surplus to send Britain's way
it makes strategic sense to retain the full verticaly integrated industrial capacity to make anything.
but financialy , Britain has zero chance of bieng competitive on the open market
> There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.
Instead the “Economic incentives” go to the Chinese owners who then learn that Americans are not interested in working in a sweatshop and instead rely on third parties to supply them with illegal workers and engage in white collar crime.
I’m suspicious of “re-industrialization” pushes because everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s resulted in at best a foreign company given massive tax breaks to create a few hundred low paid button pusher jobs and maybe a handful of better paying technician jobs.
Tangent: disturbing to see the BBC thinking they're going to get far by paywalling quasi-randomly in North America. At least right now it's trivial to ignore.
I'm not seeing this particular paywall, but disturbing in that the BBC is so awful and stupid at this, presumably.
For many years I would have gladly paid the BBC $20/mo for some way to legally watch Top Gear and Doctor Who. That's it, just two shows and I'll give you more than I give Netflix. They never offered a single legal mechanism available to US citizens, so, well.....don't admit to crimes on the internet and all that.
It was offered much later than iPlayer was for the UK, but to claim they 'never' had an option for US audiences is false when they have had Britbox for almost 10 years
Not only was Britbox launched long after iPlayer and after I stopped watching both of the shows I mentioned (in fact, Top Gear in its 2002 incarnation was functionally off the air before Britbox launched), but the BBC sold their streaming rights to those two programs such that their modern incarnations were never, so far as I'm aware, available on Britbox.
For what it's worth, I stopped paying the license fee because of how the BBC sucked up to the Tories in the lead up to the 2019 GE. From Newsnight displaying images of Corbyn that made him look like a Soviet stooge, to Laura Kuenssberg leaking postal vote ballot information, to Alex Forsyth saying that Boris Johnson "deserves" the election.
People say that it's subject to complaints of bias from both sides of the spectrum, but I've yet to see comparable concrete pro-left examples.
She is not Political Editor of BBC anymore. She's just a talk show host as I understand it (though still on a HEFTY salary - £410k, fourth highest in the BBC).
That doesn't address anything unless you stake out and back up your position. Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel advocates both accuse the BBC of bias towards the other side.
The annoying thing about the BBC paywall is that it is implemented by using different domains, so (for example here) people in the UK go to bbc.com instead of bbc.co.uk
Do you have that the wrong way round? In the UK, you go to bbc.co.uk (and bbc.com redirects to bbc.co.uk). From memory, in the US you get pushed to bbc.com.
Tangent: disturbing to see many North American news sites thinking they're going to get far by region-blocking European visitors because they don't want to be GDPR compliant ;)
When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
> When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
If someone takes something from you by force and spends it, they're spending your money.
> as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use
The government doesn't "let" us use it. If we don't use it (e.g. by swapping services directly) then the government gets annoyed and tries to insert taxable transactions into that direct value swap. It makes us use it.
GBP is a fiat currency issued by government through government spending and destroyed by government through taxation, it does not cost the taxpayer it's at worst a bad allocation of resources or incentivization of resource allocation.
It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.
You can make this same argument about a great number of things. Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like? Indeed we got caught short of vaccines recently, and had some nontrivial consideration of running a military op against NATO member over it.
Food tends to be a lot easier to produce, and many countries do often subsidize their food production, as well as have mercantilistic policies to ensure food production is kept locally.
Vaccines is a more interesting one, and would be something that might indeed be of interest to a nation. On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.
My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.
There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
> There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?
The more I learn about steel, the more I realise it's not one single thing but a whole collection of different families of things, each with different tradeoffs.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-strength_low-alloy_steel#...
One big thing about steel is actually traceability, certain industries require very specific steels. One example that always comes to mind is Sheffield Forgemaster's who are one of the few places in the world that can make absolutely gargantuan sized castings for nuclear reactors and marine equipment
Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis.
A wartime effort has to keep supplies moving daily, or the front collapses.
Whereas the need for vaccines is heavily deferred - your population is already vaccinated in peacetime, and you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war, nor vaccinate new population during one either: that large vaccinated population providing herd immunity gives you a lot of runway for children with less access.
> Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis
.. what were you doing in 2020?
> you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war
The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been.
Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can fight with the tools of WW2, ships and tanks, rather than a war we don't recognize fought with weapons we don't understand and have no counter for. Or, more likely, simply get bought out at the top. Why fire a missile when you can buy a political party for a mere £5m?
> .. what were you doing in 2020?
Waiting several years for widespread vaccine availability, and practicing good hygiene and social distancing.
Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.
As I recall, the economic damage of the pandemic was ~ "it's worth spending ten billion dollars to make the vaccinations arrive one day sooner": https://www.newsweek.com/operation-warp-speed-what-deal-opin...
(And that was just the cost to the USA, not the world as a whole).
Which does not change the fact that the pandemic was a peacetime crisis where it was possible but not practical to keep most systems running if needed.
Coronavirus wasn't bullseyeing vaccine shipments in the Pacific or taking down air freighters.
EDIT: I mean I don't know why you think this is a catch-22: countries pursue both capabilities, and the UK has a pharmaceutical industry and on shore manufacturing capabilities.
Whereas many industrialized nations are struggling to keep steel making capabilities on shore and running. So why is steel special? Because currently it's the one we're in danger of losing (and much harder to ship globally even if you have allies).
> Viruses aren't so good at seizing and holding territory.
Neither is infantry that's sick with the flu, which may have been a factor in the ending of of WWI.
Tis hard to practice good hygiene and social distancing in the trenches.
If one side had better access to vaccines or access to better vaccines in a conflict during a pandemic, it would be significant, regardless of how the pandemic came about.
> The lab leak people are probably wrong
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...
That is indeed the testimony of Steven C. Quay, one of "the lab leak people" that are asserted by GP to be probably wrong.
Very few people would claim that there is no testimony for the lab leak claim, it's simply that relatively few domain scientists support that claim.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_C._Quay
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
> relatively few domain scientists support that claim
I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.
One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.
What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?
Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
> What kind of expertise should you possess to be able to comment on a lab theory?
Enough.
> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?
People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.
What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?
>Enough.
So someone with expertise in other non relevant fields is enough? Yet people that have expertise in relevant fields dispute his conclusions and its not relevant somehow?
You really like to stand up incorrect assumptions to argue against. Second time you've done so in this short interaction.
Not a word yet about your motivation. Huh. You'd think anyone out here demanding others' credentials would lead by presenting their own.
Not your credentials specifically, but Steven Quay. Cursory search suggest he's not an expert in relevant fields, but does have a book about lab leak theory. Immediately suspicious as there are a lot of scientists that turn to grifting in areas that were not relevant to their expertise.
I don't much care what the man does with his free time. I'm more interested in the veracity of his statements. On that front he supplies copious references to peer reviewed research by numerous others and primary sources. Character assassination is for folks who can't argue on the merits.
You still haven't offered your own credentials.
you definitely want flu vaccines for your infantry, lest they get captured or killed en mass due to fever
on a similar note, medical supplies and logistics are a huge deal for going to war, to handle casualties
> On the other hand I don't think many governments are that concerned about another pandemic, sometimes the discourse regarding it very much sounds like "what are the odds it'll happen again"
Gambler's fallacy will keep striking until we do better, won't it.
The food example, is the exact reason for large farming subsidies in the European Union. These were implemented as a founding initiative, due to the experience of food shortages during the second world war. A great number of things could be considered critical. Due to the nature of when access could be cut off, the main thing countries likely worry about being able to access, is things humans need to stay alive, and things needed to wage war.
Farming subsidies are one of the most criticized parts of the EU. My comment isn't in support of it. But even so, subsidy is quite different from compulsory purchase. The question is: why is steel special. Not in a no-action-vs-some-action way, but why so aggressive?
Ironically I think it's the same for both steel and farmers: they provide votes.
Because like, every basic war machine is made from it? Like how is this a question?
There's been two world wars and access to or stockpiling of steel has been a critical strategic factor in both.
Most consumable military assets are made from steel, for example and it underpins most machine tools and factory components as well.
Also all non-flying forms of transport.
For lots of reasons but if you're the UK and you're honest with yourself and you are only allowed to pick exactly one reason that steel is absolutely critical?
Royal Navy.
Ezcept that the shipyards closed in the 1970s.
Farming subsidies are the only way to prevent famine, the granary system sort of works, but regularly resulted in shortages and famines throughout every empire in history. Even not accounting for longer term climate trends, yield due to weather can vary up to 30% in a year, so it only makes sense to pay for a bit of over production so in the event of a couple bad years your food output is merely break even, and not 70% of needs.
Its better to pay 5 cents more for a loaf now than pay $20 a loaf with rationing later, or if we went back to granary system possibly getting moldy food.
Isn't the point of rationing to prevent the loaf going to $20.
Usually no one tolerates rationing until it’s already at $20 a loaf.
Steel comes from iron, which you can't grow. It's more critical than food, which you can grow. Same for vaccines.
> Steel comes from iron, which you can't grow
Right, and where is the iron coming from in the scenario where we can't import steel?
As it is top-critical, you're recycling it, opening new mines, and taking it by force.
Don't most of these contingencies apply to steel in the first place?
Nope. The entire point here is facing the decision on which of these contingencies will apply.
Why can't steel be recycled or taken by force?
Recycling steel uses by and large the same industrial sites as making new steel. Most new steel has some amount of recycled steel mixed in, the trick is getting the ratios of various types of scrap right
ok but in the bad situation, your steel is at the bottom of the ocean. how are you recycling that?
Obviously there are a lot of important things you need to keep a country running, but steel is a key input a in a huge number of very important sectors (infrastructure, military, automotive etc.) so having some ability to produce your own steel seems a sensible hedge.
>Why is steel any more critical than food or vaccines or the like?
Countries that import large shares of their food and medical supply chains are constantly trying to develop domestic capacity.
Yep, same can be said of manufacturing capability in general. If you don't have a manufacturing base then inevitably when there's a war you may find yourself unable to build defense components.
Supply chains are so diversified that self sufficiency is only feasible for countries the size of US and China.
Russia has been forced to cannibalize jet planes because sanctions have starved it of spare parts.
Even the US Navy gets its ships built in South Korea now.
Britain's remaining industries are very niche. With a small domestic market, you can't get economies of scale. You have to specialize.
The UK is still the world's 5th largest economy. It's a large domestic market, just not a hyperscale one.
Except out of the top 5, UK has the lowest manufacturing basis while 80%+ of GDP are service based.
Let's imagine a hypothetical symmetrical war between two modern countries. One can disable the other's satellites and maintain their own fleet. The other can't get access to any third parties' satellites.
You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distribute satellites.
In a defensive war, a steel navy sitting in spitting distance of your shores and an army of steel tanks will still do a lot to keep the enemy at bay. And you can swap the tank turrets for Gatling guns on some of your newly produced tanks to help against drones
You wouldn't be able to win the war in your scenario, but you could still do a lot to make sure the other side isn't winning either.
If machine guns were useful against drones Russia would be winning in Ukraine.
Check out Russia's Black Sea fleet to learn the fate of your navy sitting by your shores.
russia is currently holding just about all the land it wants in Ukraine
They might not be taking Kiev for a hundred years, but the fortress belt is well within reach in the next couple of years
If they were to negotiate an end tomorrow, Russia certainly wouldnt be giving up territory in ukraine. i dont see how thats not winning
If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave. A ton of casualties and further international isolation aren’t really worth the middling gains Russia could negotiate for peace today. Which is probably one of the reasons they still haven’t, sunk cost fallacy and all that.
> If you’re looking at win vs loss you also need to look at what you got in return for what you gave.
This.
Russia is suffering over 400 casualties for every square km (1036 per square mile!) of territory captured in Donetsk, screwing their own economy and turning themselves into a pariah. Russia certainly isn't winning.
https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...
Ukraine taking on rounds after rounds of multi billion euro loans also isn’t winning…
They need a peace deal but external parties don’t want Ukraine to do this. The same ones lending the money
Neither side needs a peace deal as of right now, that’s completely ridiculous.
Russia is not only on the precipice of giving up territory in Ukraine, it's likely to give up so much more because its ability to function as a country is being systematically destroyed.
The only barrier between Russians and anarchy is the last nine meals they’ve had. How's the summer harvest coming along?
Is that land worth the costs Russia has endured? Very obviously not, that’s why it’s not “winning”. If they could turn back the clocks they would.
The benefit of war is almost never worth the cost. It just tends to scale up from repeated mutual miscalculations. For instance WW1 started from a Bosnian Serb assassinating the Austro-Hungarian heir and the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it. Everybody would have certainly turned back the clock there if they could, even moreso given that "The War to End All Wars" directly set the stage for WW2. But that doesn't mean that the Allied Powers didn't win WW1.
It's nowhere near the same thing.
This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.
Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.
Would you say that Austria-Hungary choosing to outright invade Serbia because the assassin was a Bosnian Serb who might have had some backing from the government, was reasonable? Or was that a land grab? And when when Russia joins Serbia was it solely an action of obligation or because they thought they might be able to get a piece of Austria-Hungary? And similarly when Germany jumps in seeing they can now shift the balance back towards Austria-Hungary, and so on.
And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.
In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.
Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic.
> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions
So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…
Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail.
There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.
So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...
They weren't. Ukraine is still nowhere near getting a membership action plan, which is the formal start of membership negotiations.
We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.
The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.
Doesn't matter now. Ukraine will never join NATO. Poland will be happy to veto their entry, and will be happy having Ukraine be the buffer state that can sacrifice its youth for the sake of Europe. What Zelensky did with honoring the UPA was irredeemable.
Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.
>In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.
If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?
Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?
>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West
It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.
Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?
>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys
No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.
Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.
The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3 days came from the West, not Russia. [1] And it's highly improbable that "we" actually even believed that. Wars don't ever end in 3 days, and Ukraine had been pumped full of arms for years, had multiple cities that been heavily fortified for war, and an army approaching a million men, large numbers of of "ultra nationalists" itching for a fight, and all of this before all men of "fighting age" (up to 60) were locked in the country and started being forced into the military. Why we were putting out nonsensical rhetoric that could serve no viable purpose other than to try to entice an invasion (and as such would normally be classified) is a question with only one apparent answer.
The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.
I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
> If they could turn back the clocks they would.
That’s not my very objective understanding of Russian history.
>russia is currently holding just about all the land it wants in Ukraine
Based on? The fact it tried to take Kyiv in the first week? That it's still trying to advance?
If Russia were to collapse tomorrow, they would lose everything, I don't see how that's winning.
It still hasn't got all of Donbas.
Russia can't even keep what it previously took. Crimea is becoming indefensible.
Russia's explicit and communicated goals for this war were utterly failed by day four of the invasion. Arguably they lost within hours when they failed to take Hostemel airport.
By Russia's own accounting, they lost years ago. It does not matter what the outcome is, Russia has taken massive pain to sustain this war they never planned to sustain. They entirely used up their immense Soviet inheritance, which was something they held in high regard and used to insist made them strong. It's gone now. Used up.
The gas station of Europe can no longer produce sufficient gasoline for internal use. It will take at least months to get that capability back.
They have utterly failed to substitute sanctioned components, having switched back to imported components after their internal substitutions performed so poorly.
Their navy is being taken apart by a country that scuttled it's own navy on day one. Ukraine sunk the flagship of the black sea fleet with supposedly just a few missiles, something which the Moskva by all accounts on paper, should have handled just fine. Except all their craft are in such poor condition that many of the systems on the Moskva were likely just nonfunctional, including defense radars, communications, and anti-missile defenses.
Russia was totally reliant on an American private company for their battlefield communications, and is not coping with the shutdown of their access, which they should have been prepared for long ago. They were also dependent on Discord and Telegram.
Russia is being seriously wounded by a country much smaller than it, which also ostensibly had all the same problems as Russia, like poor soviet doctrine, corruption, a poor economy, and demographic issues.
Russia is failing to compete industrially with a former vassal.
Russia had to import soldiers and ammo from north korea.
Russia's weapons export industry is dead. Nobody wants their trash that has proven terrible on the battlefield. Nobody expects Russia to actually be able to build what they claim to sell anymore.
Russia is so run dry on arms that they couldn't help Venezuela against the US invasion. They sent a single anti air weapon system.
Half a million Russians are dead.
If the war ends today and Russia is allowed to keep all the land it is currently standing on, it still has lost. It's not even a Pyrrhic victory at this point.
Is it that they can't work, or that they are too expensive for Russia to field any appreciable amount that won't just make them valuable targets? Its not trivial to produce the hundreds of thousands of rounds you need for each one to be ready.
If there is any nation on earth that is capable of cheaply producing large quantities of simple weapons of war it is the Russians. The issue is not a lack of cheap bullets.
The PM M1910 is used by Ukraine to shoot down drones.
Everyone in this discussion seems to be forgetting Trident as well. There's a lot of assumption the next war will be helpfully similar to WW2, and some sort of reverse sweet spot where we are subject to naval interdiction but will not deploy the strategic nuclear deterrent, and at the same time have enough time to build things, but not things that require any of the rest of the supply chain than steel (I have bad news about the number of ASIC fabs in the UK).
Back to "dead men dominate UK politics". In this case, we're trying to refight a war from 70 years ago.
We follow a path governed only by the logic chain of previous mistakes. Our next recognition of one could be pretty brutal.
The absolute worst case is that it's not advantageous/useful at all in the next war to have the capability, but it wouldn't harm you at all if you do have it, it just wouldn't be useful. In every other case, from the worst case all the way up the continuum to the best case, having the capability is beneficial to varying levels of degree.
How many billions have you spent propping up useless industries in the years before the war though? What capacities could have been built with those billions otherwise?
Well if trident gets used then what comes next is irrelevant.
It's like planning for your house burning down V dying. If you're dead you don't really need to worry about the after.
So yes the military plans for everyone but global thermo nuclear war, because there's no point planning for that anyway.
I wouldn't say were planning for the next ww2. Look at the number of tanks we have. If anything were over optimised for helping the US fight insurgencies in the middle east at the expense of being able to fight a high intensity war.
For Americans wondering why they were making a Judas Priest album public property, it's actually a company based in S****horpe.
S tier post
would it be situational re economies, though?
i.e. if you have a lot of financial resources and can buy 1000 ships cheaply for the cost of propping up your steel industry to build 100 ships, should you buy 1000 ships (or the steel needed to build them quickly) to instead?
Drone and satellites don't hold territory.
Steel on its own is inert and useless, you need to retain the entire downstream manufacturing ecosystem that consumes it. Like cars for example, producing steel but letting all your vehicle manufacturers sell off to foreign owners just so you can import BYDs doesn't do you any good.
The UK car industry had been doing quite well until Brexit.
Uk based but foreign owned UK car industry…
I was told by economists that the invisible hand would solve this!
Sometimes a pimp slap is what is needed, but no one ever signs up for one voluntarily.
Having said that if you have no source of iron ore and no self sufficient energy production you’re stuffed anyway.
The UK ran out of both a fair while ago
Notably, things like that is why they had their colonies.
In fact, during the age of empire Britain exported coal all over the world. That was one resource it did have.
Cotton was another matter.
It still has 3+ billion tons of coal reserves - no one wants to burn them though, apparently.
Britain didn't run out of coal, it's just in deep seams that are uneconomic to extract compared to strip-mined lignite.
Newcastle is proverbially built on top of the stuff.
Although renewable energy sources and electric arc furnaces that consume scrap are preferred these days.
Its also not price competitive as producedin the uk. No high energy industry will survive in europe
This reminded me of an article in The Economist published last year, April 2025:
"Zombie politics: how Dead Man dominates British politics"[1]
Two prescient paragraphs related to today's news:
[1] https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/04/09/zombie-politics...
This sounds good until you run out of steel and out of sellers as well
Half of all steel in the UK is imported anyway, and there are many places to obtain it. Unless the UK goes to war with most of the world at the same time, it’s not going to have trouble getting steel.
If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons.
Domestic steel production is an essential element of being sovereign, as opposed to being the handpuppet of a larger power (like the US).
> If there is a large war, those countries will prioritize domestic consumption and the UK will immediately stop being able to produce weapons.
Same with the iron we'd need to make our own steel.
And a current glut just makes it even cheaper for us to stockpile, vs spending on votes by propping up a failing industry.
I don't see how the UK could generally be self-sufficient in any large war.
It certainly wasn't self-sufficient in the last two large wars.
Britain's last two territorial conflicts involved the Falklands, and Icelandic fishing ships in the neighborhood of Rockall. I don't recall that third party assistance was required in either dispute, thank you very much.
The US the other hand is always asking for other countries to bail it out of some mess or other.
Did you miss the word "large"? And the UK required significant US assistance during the Falkland Islands war, so apparently you're quite ignorant about history.
https://time.com/archive/6882618/just-how-much-did-the-u-s-h...
When bald men fight over a comb, you need teeth.
That's right: the bald man with nuclear weapons won it back.
And as combs go, it was one with considerable geopolitical significance.
The UK has nuclear weapons.
The command and control systems are American. The intelligence network is American. The last time the British military acted without US support was Suez. The UK went in on NATO 100%.
France took an entirely different set of conclusions from Suez.
Somewhere under the sea at this very moment there is a British submarine captain who could nuke Moscow tonight if he (and his crew) wanted to.
There’s absolutely nothing the Americans could do about it.
NATO can and probably would shoot them out of the sky using ballistic missile defence. IIRC Britain has a total of 8 missiles.
Britain's obsolete Trident subs are manufactured by Lockheed, so if they fall out with Trump they will lose access to spare parts. The replacements aren't due until 2028.
Are you under some absurd notion that NATO has ballistic missile defense in Russia? Or can magically reach out and intercept a ballistic missile anywhere on the globe?
If there was the right Arleigh Burke right next to the submarine (which there wont be), and the captain was insanely paranoid enough to contravene standing rules of engagement to already be prepared for a surprise ally launching a weapon, there's about a 50% chance they could intercept each missile.
Now check where the inputs to steel production come from.
The UK built a lot of refining to use local iron ore and coal deposits. It used those deposits. They are now substantially used up. Subsurface mining is uneconomic, and open mining is politically unthinkable.
There is actually a really high quality government review of the whole subject: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/690b868714b04...
Lots of discussion of moving to EAF/DRI from traditional blast furnaces.
When there's a war and you need sovereignty how would open mining be unthinkable
Really? There is a large war going on right now and the key material is chips. Drone don't use a lot of steel, neither do missiles or modern airplanes.
Yes you need artillery and particularly shells. But you are so much more limited by the capacity of your munition factories that how much steel you have would not be an issue. One of the main things you would need for a new munitions factory is trained workers.
The World Wars were wars of mass mobilization and industrial capacity. People went into the first thinking cavalry was important, the second thinking battleships still mattered. My point is I have no idea what the next great war might be like, but thinking the winner will be who chugs out the most tanks in five years may be looking in the rear view mirror.
Drones are only part of the equation you need to be able to forge things
You can't occupy territory with drones (yet). You will need people and moving people in a drone-infested environment will mean protecting them with armoured vehicles. Yes, these vehicles will need enhancements and other new tech to counter drones, but armoured vehicles aren't going away (MAYBE the tank's days are numbered, though).
If you are really interested in this, I highly recommend subscribing to war on the rocks. Their articles and paid podcasts have legit defense industry people publishing studies on this subject. https://warontherocks.com
Thanks, I subscribe.
I am not saying drones are everything. My point is, where is the war in which steel is critical ?
It's a myth that battleships didn't matter in WWII. They ended up being critically important in the Pacific Theater for carrier escort and amphibious fire support. They didn't stop mattering until the widespread deployment of guided missiles and other precision munitions.
They found a use for them but no reason to build anymore.
> Domestic steel production is an essential element of being sovereign, as opposed to being the handpuppet of a larger power (like the US).
How did self-sufficiency shake out for Europe as a whole during WWII?
It’s only possible for Dead Man valorizing politicians to be elected because much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
> much of the electorate worships the same. They all have parents too, naturally.
Well, yes. But not many of them worship the generation who were mostly responsible for voting in favour of Brexit (60% support among those aged 65 and over at the time of the vote).
I think they do, actually. They just have a disconnect about it. But e.g. removing the triple lock is unpopular not just among those of an age to be affected by it.
The triple lock actually benefits everyone not currently retired, just .. not until they actually retire.
Only if you assume it's sustainable until you personally die. But that seems in constant question even now.
This is true, but .. for all retirement planning, you kind of have to assume no-collapse. It's also incoherent to say "the government pays too much attention to retirees" and "I expect to be defrauded by the government when I retire, along with my entire generation, and to be powerless to stop this" at the same time.
Fishing holds similar role in the UK and France (at least). Tiny components of the overall economy, giant patriotic feels.
I still think some manufacturing is simply strategic, and you should maintain a capability even at a (financial) loss though.
> Fishing holds similar role in the UK
Indeed and ironically most British people refuse to eat the species commonly found in UK waters, e.g. mackerel etc.
Because the Brits are so fussy, most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
> most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod.
Not always (Cod Wars). And our herring catch was once its own industry.
> And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers.
They thought they'd have a monopoly on those fishing grounds post-Brexit.
The problem for them wasn't the sales, it was the catches. The EU was good for farmers, not so good for fisheries. The EU fishing rules meant multiple countries could fish the same grounds meaning overfishing. The UK was much stricter on net sizes than Spain was.
> The EU was good for farmers, not so good for fisheries.
It was good for industrial farming, not the farmers themselves, one of the big reasons for Norway refusing to join was the impact it would have on farmers.
That seems more a feelings than fact based view. The Norwegian referendum had many reasons, but as for Brexit they were not necessarily based on rational analysis. Norway is nominally independent but in every economic sector, including farming, pretty much integrated with the EU countries.
I knew plenty of smaller and tenant farmers who benefitted from the EU. There weren't industrial farms around there.
What, these guys?
https://britishseafishing.co.uk/scottish-black-fish-scandal/
> … rigged scales … secret underground [fish] pipes … extra conveyor belt … allowed up to 70 per cent of their catches to go undeclared
> … spent the money they made through the scam on second homes in Spain and France.
In the US that's farming. The "family farm" which is rare ends up being the justification for tons of agribusiness subsidies.
The good news is the USA produces lots of food.
That is because fishing has multiple other factors. For one, it is a major component of certain towns and villages, so while it isn't important to big cities, it is on the smaller scale in particular areas. It keeps harbours open and is also a draw for tourists, so I would say it has different implications than, say, shoe manufacturing.
The British chocolate industry was a major employer in some places but has been decimated. British chocolate was certainly not the best in the world but it was better than what it has been turned into in the last few years, thanks to palm oil, international take overs etc.
Fishing tourism?
Like... commercial fishing with a net? Not sport fishing?
No, more like people going and seeing a harbour with actual fishing boats in it. It is a pretty sight...
But some do sightseeing trips, diving and sports fishing too.
Huh. Would be a bit of a busman's holiday for me, but TIL.
in canada at least, you can catch a bush plane out to the middle of nowhere up north at a hunting and fishing lodge for a week.
idk if that counts as sport fishing, or sport sexual assault?
Well since Mondelez night Caburies, Milka, and other major brands across Europe it has slowly been downgrading their quality. So unfortunately not a purely British problem and even more unfortunately an intentional business strategy by a Swiss conglomerate.
Kind of the best European chocolate option, if you want to avoid the Swiss and don't want to buy the premium for pralines is the JD Gross company which is mainly delivering to Lidl.
what a bizarre article, completely disconnected from reality. in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
why does The Economist have so much disdain of manufacturing and people who work in it? look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it. then look at the UK, who is struggling to build Hinkley Point C, or HS2 (projected to be the most expensive high-speed rail in the world btw). The Economist is an absolute f*ing joke.
The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market; AND the popular view of manufacturing (large plant staffed by a large number of men being the dominant employer of a nearby town or city) doesn't look anything like the reality of modern manufacturing (small run boutique high value stuff like satellites and turbines, highly automated and professionalized, relatively small number of employees).
This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/14/university...
Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned.
[...]
The subjects with the biggest staff cuts were social work (-9%), English and classics (both -8%), anthropology (-7%) and linguistics (-6%).
https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/town-and-gown/univers...
"Universities brought in an estimated £24 billion to the UK economy from abroad in 2022. They provide services (education) to international students who bring money to the institutions from abroad through international fees. These students also bring money to the local economy by spending on goods and services while they are studying"
(presumably there's an attempt to imply that those are bad courses in some way, but you haven't shown your working)
How many destroyer keels has U. Essex laid down this decade?
None? That's not really its job?
whoosh
You'll find Colchester lads undeniably tasty around closing time on a Saturday.
It's not boutique vs large plant. It's base materials (paper mills, steel smelters, plastic etc) that tend to be low in added value, versus higher up the stack (like your examples) that also tend to be higher in added value.
Most countries didn't care much for the former other than historic reasons, but like the latter for obvious reasons (add £ to GDP).
That's changing due to "sovereignty". You can't build a satellite without metal profiles, wiring, tubes etc. Which requires manufacturing capacity for those. Which requires steel/alu/copper smelters & plastic extruders. Which requires plastic & thus a chemical industry.
This whole 'sovereign movement' is about keeping/bringing back capabilities across the stack which are deemed critical (like steel).
But I suspect there are few (if any) countries that have these dependency chains mapped out in detail.
>The point is that manufacturing is a relatively small part of both the economy and the job market
Yes because the UK is overfinancialised to a ridiculous degree. It has deindustralised in doing so.
>This leads to stupid decisions like gutting the university sector, which is a major export industry.
I'd call it more of a major import industry. At the same time your doctors and such are leaving the country.
Besides, if these are so profitable why are they making the cuts you think? Is it that those degrees aren't exactly paying off in an economy that can't consist of HR departments and other PMC's?
> look at China, look at their manufacturing industry and what they are able to do with it.
"look at China" what ? Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
Remember what is often said when Mr Trump talks about bringing tech manufacturing back to the US ....
Yes great idea Mr Trump. But even with the most generously optimistic figures, due to the lack of available workforce and space the US could only ever provide the capacity equivalent to one Chinese manufacturing town of which the Chinese have dozens.
> Have you seen the population size of China ? Have you seen the geographic size of China ?
British thinking seems to be that because we won the Opium War we should just expect a country with 20 times our population and a vast land area to be poorer, both per capita and in total, than our island, forever.
It did work for awhile though, eh?
the US and china are basically the same size geographically though? and the US federally owns tons of land it can create manufacturing cities out of
> and the US federally owns tons of land it can create manufacturing cities out of
Ok, being generous and accepting your point at face value ....
What about the people staffing those manufacturing cities ? Is the state creating them too ?
I seem to recall reading somewhere that – at most – the US could "find" 200,000 people for new manufacturing plants.
Sounds about right to me, no ?
I think even with a generous mind the US would struggle to "find" much more than that, let alone getting to or exceeding 1 million which is the value you would need for seriously thinking about >1 manufacturing city.
The US labor force participation rate is currently at a relatively low level. There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Isn't that just due to people retiring?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
No, the labor force metrics only include people of working age.
Then why does my link specifically have a "25-54 Yrs" qualification, and has a totally different shape compared to the first link? The difference between the two is stark, 21.8 percentage points. Do you really think there's that many people willing to work between 18-25 and 54+?
> Do you really think there's that many people willing to work between 18-25 and 54+?
And willing to work long hours at the minimum-wage rates required for US-based manufacturing ....
P.S. 18-25 and 54+ ... its actually 16–25 and 54+ I don't think you'll find many 16–18 year olds biting your arm off for a job in manufacturing either...
US average manufacturing average wage is $36/hr, which is far more than minimum wage.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES3000000003
> US average manufacturing average wage is $36/hr,
Chinese-scale manufacturing cities in the US at $36/hr ? Yeah, that ... ain't happening.
The average does not represent the entry level wage, which is closer to minimum wage in some states. Why would you risk losing an appendage in a factory machine if you can fold t-shirts for the same pay?
They include the civilian noninstitutional population, which includes retirees who are not institutionalized in a nursing home: https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#population
as far as people go, the US could grant citizenship to all those people its trying to deport?
and there isnt a lack of people that would accept working in one of said manufacturing towns for 10 years or something to get US citizenship?
If manufacturing was a serious problem, the US could definitely solve that problem too.
>in what world is manufacturing, a sector that has been neglected for decades at this point, having any sway on politics in Britain.
Are you confusing the lack of effective interventions with "neglect"? Nearly every administration in the past decade had some sort of an industrial policy, but even though they failed to bring manufacturing back to britain, that doesn't mean "neglect". It just means the forces of globalization is too strong.
The Economist is a mouthpiece for the money power, specifically the banking interests of the Rothschild and Cadbury families. The idea of making money by making things (as opposed to arbitrage) is anathema to them.
>The idea of making money by making things (as opposed to arbitrage) is anathema to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial_stance_of_The_Econom...
They're pro free trade against government intervention. That's not the same as "making things ... is anathema to them". They're for planning reform in uk, to help build infrastructure and homes, for instance.
They're pro-offshoring of any sort of industrial base. Line-goes-up!
> They're for planning reform in uk
As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
>As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich
Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.
You are very naive about the neutrality of Wikipedia.
Maintaining the Wikipedia page is part of what any PR/reputation management agency does.
Right, which is why the first part of my comment, before mentioning wikipedia at all is "Source?". Wikipedia might be biased, but it's a good starting point. Likewise, it's very hard to take you seriously when all you can do is complain about how wikipedia is biased/astroturfed, but can't provide any sources to contradict the wikipedia article, yet are willing to take a random commenter at face value.
The economist is pravda for the global globalist class.
It's not at all surprising that they're hostile to the idea of a nation doing anything to take its fate into its own hands when it comes to supply chains etc.
The Economist is a neoliberal dish rag.
There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay" themselves to live in their own houses. So as housing prices go up, so does imputed rent. House prices have increasingly become the best vehicle for investment funds because the returns are esentially protected. But none of that produces anything.
The UK in particular has been described as buy-to-let economy.
It doesn't have to be this way. If you limit property speculation then capital will find something else productive to do, like manufacturing. Dish rags like The Economist present it as inevitable that Western nations become financialized. It's simply not true. Look at Germany. Also look at the fact that Germany greatly limits the collaterialization and speculation on property. That's not an accident.
[1]: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/02/14/10-or-gdp-is-...
In Switzerland this fictional imputed rent is actually extremly real. We have to pay taxes as if it was earned income.
So you live in your fully owned flat, pretend to rent it to yourself and then pay income taxes on that amount. The point is your government can make this "fake" value very real.
Luckily we recently voted to abolish this tax so it will be gone in some years. This tax was introduced as an emergency measure in ww1.
I mean yes, that makes sense.
But, the issue is about capacity. Steel and metals generally are a core part of the UK economy. Yes we could just buy it all in from outside, but when geopoltics intervenes it leaves us high and dry (see natural gas, chemical production, wire making, transformer making, etc etc)
If we end up in a war, which seems fairly reasonable, then we need to have access to a manufacturing, not only prototypes, but large scale manufacturing. we need not only the machines, but the people, experience and pipelines to keep that working.
Interesting how they haven't repeated in this article earlier claims that the Chinese purchase of the steelworks was a strategic move to slowly destroy the blast furnaces by letting them cool under pretext of low demand.
The state intervened to stop the Chinese from sabotaging their furnaces. Seems like an open and shut case unless you have 5 eyes intelligence sources.
See also Chinese companies buying UK private schools and closing them down
Original: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/02/chinese-company-...
https://archive.is/dRQsB#selection-2155.4-2155.79
Choice quote from the article
UK private schools spent decades ingratiating themselves to Eastern European gangsters, Arab tyrants and the scions of Asian oligarchs probably including CCP kids. China-pandering has also undermined university education, although the individual Chinese students tend 5o be okay.
I suppose you reap what you sow.
I don't know what happened in that particular case but worldwide declining birth rates will inevitably force many schools to close.
Sounds like classic private equity, no? Buy it, sell off all the valuable parts, close it down, repeat.
Who needs the Chinese to ruin your country when your own people will happily kill successful companies for the tiniest scrap of profit?
The government is forced to sell steel at a loss, because all the buyers for whom this is a such a vital supply would otherwise buy cheaper imported steel, every single one of them.
And ultimately all the ore and coke used to make the steel are imported anyway.
Until something happens that disrupts the supply chains from abroad and suddenly there's an issue
if theres supply chain disruption abroad, its probably going to affect the ore and coke exports too
Far more fungible than steel plant products.
coke is pretty dependent on where it was mined, isn't it?
1018 is 1018 wherever it was made
2 things: a) Government plays a part in the cost of things - especially years of mis-investment around energy generation has sent British prices to the stratosphere and employment taxation levels greater than those 'cheaper' producers. b) The 'cheaper' producers are still _producers_ and thus have control - if they need to hoard their own supply they will, or if they need to leverage it for some political gain they might.
The same is, as far as I can grasp it, true for butter, bread, milk and eggs. Only there, it is already established.
Isn't this exactly the kind of problem that tariffs are meant to address?
The government is the only entity which can gain money from running a business at a loss. For example: running trains at a loss will reduce car traffic, thus reducing losses from traffic jams and reducing road maintenance costs. With steel the government can recoup losses from producing cheap steel through steel-dependent services like roadworks, the military, public housing,...
What, again?
(British Steel's predecessor was itself a nationalisation effort in the 60s.)
The history is longer and more tangled than that.
1951 - Nationalised by Attlee (Labour)
1953 - Re-privatised by Churchill (Conservative)
1967 - Nationalised again by Wilson (Labour)
1988 - Privatised again by Thatcher (Conservative)
1999 - Allowed to merge with Dutch Hoogovens into Corus by Blair (Labour)
2007 - Allowed to be sold to Tata Steel by Blair (Labour)
2016 - Tata allowed to sell to Greybull Capital by Cameron (Conservative)
2020 - Takeover by Chinese Jingye under Johnson (Conservative)
I worked there for three years in the mid 90s.
Personally, I think it should have been left alone after 1951.
But it is arguable whether ideologically driven militant unions would have destroyed it in the 1970s and 1980s.
The UK loves to take various infrastructure and industries private and public depending on which government is in power at the moment. See also trains, water, etc
I had not realised UK still had mining for iron ore, but it seems it's even a net exporter [1]. In that case it really makes sense to keep such a strategic industry alive as both the up- and downstream companies would suffer if it's shut down.
[1] https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/iron-ore/repo...
The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), which would have provided orders for virgin steel from such furnaces. It's hard to see how this has a happy and sustainable ending.
I immediately thought of the Judas Priest album and agreed that supplying heavy metal to the UK is indeed vital.
I assume, ultimately western nations will have to adopt what already exists for agricultural goods for production as well. I am afraid it will end as a per-worker subsidy analog to per-area-of-land for lack of a better metric but in the end, that is what will be necessary if one wants to keep any industrial capabilities.
Meanwhile Australia's last remaining manganese plant shut down last night...
It wasn't economically feasible, the owners wanted out, no buyers stepped up.
Numbers wise it was ~ 1.6 million tonne per annum in a global market that demands ~ 20 million tonne per annum, as a smaller producer in Tasmania with other factors dragging down it wasn't competitive with South Africa, Gabon, and Ghana.
Australia’s only manganese smelter to close, administrators say - https://www.mining.com/web/australias-only-manganese-smelter...
right - but in the context of this thread, manganese is a vital ingredient to smelting iron - so Australia seems it is no longer self sufficient.
It still has shuttered plants to do all manner of things - in the event of an actual need to boot these up again, it can be done.
I wouldn't be so sure about that - as an example, I know at least one Victorian refinery is being torn down and scrapped as seen by my own eyes.
I can reel off a list of plants being torn down for scrap also.
The question is, does that actually mean there is no way to get a smelter up and running in the event of a critical need within a useful timeframe.
Bear in mind, right now today, Australia has multiple shuttered lithium production sites that went up in anticipation of a much greater battery demand than actually occurred, and have since been shuttered. In a similar manner the same is true for other mineral supply chains.
The link to mining.com was a nod to the historic ebb and flow of Australian exploration / production and the kinds of things that get hashed out at the Diggers and Dealers mining forums.
In terms of "critical resources" - we have them in the ground, and we have a lot of smelting technology that we can draw on / repurpose.
What Australia does lack, for now, is next level up processing - eg: hard rock lithium spodumene concentrate processing, currently outsourced to China and Malaysia, only recently barely begun here.
I guess that's the question - how fast can you build required plants during war time?
How do you get the very bespoke equipment from overseas if supply chains are being attacked?
Where do you get the designers and operational staff, bearing in mind the industry might have been closed for a while and all prior talent has retired or died?
What's the risk of above vs the government subsidising a plant to keep it operational and known good state?
> How do you get the very bespoke equipment
For manganese ore concentration and binding with carbon?? Ball mills, acid washing, screening, anodes, et al. are 'bespoke' now?
Look, there are big speciality bits which you can order in from overseas, fabricate locally, or retrieve from "stashed one over there" yards.
When existing processing plants are "scrapped" that usually means that beams, catwalks, and all manner of things are crushed and melted down - but it also means that motors, crucibles, linings, etc. are sold on (usually within Australia), or stored and eventually refurbished and sold or reused.
> to keep it operational and known good state?
Is it? It's been going for a while and no one was interested in stepping in due to economics and clean-up issues: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-17/future-liberty-bell-b...
Some might take the approach of suggesting a partial teardown / refit to be more Norwegian in its carbon consumption: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592552...
So really its all conjecture unless an actual project plan is written up with supply chain sources, and the plan is kept up to date with inventory of items scrapped vs placed in storage and capacity from current importers & manufacturers.
A lot of things could happen, sure.
One thing that I, personally, am not overly concerned about would be a long lasting critical shortage of ferromanganese production ability in Australia.
If the demand / desire is there then we have the resources and in-country skills to step up and make it happen.
We are, as a country, aiming too low on what we can do with mineral resources and charging other countries / non-Australian companies far too little for the privilege of extracting our "wealth" / assets and flogging them on overseas.
Unfortunately too many Australians are swayed by scare campaigns and vote against their own interest.
The mining super profits tax, franking credits, and similar failed reforms benefited only the top 1% of 1% of Australians, yet people voted against them.
Hopefully the recent negative gearing and trust changes stick.
Yet the privatised water companies are still pumping raw sewage into rivers to save money and make more profit?
one of the most hilarious examples of how the current wh admins false protectionism, in my mind, is the crucible steel bankruptcy in jan/feb 2025.
its a technological tragedy because it was the only facility im aware of globally that could actually manufacture steel based carbide alternatives at commercial volumes. idk if the relevant equipment is being operated by anyone post bankruptcy. powder steel equipment is a bit less destroyed when turned off, but i think the key blocker is that heat cycling a 3k centigrade furnace will age the material and cause cracking thatmakes it hard to resume the powederization flows
Pretty sure there's more than enough in Australia.
Iron ore yes, smelting capacity, don't know, but it's literally on the other side of the world.
One can argue whether, in abstract, this was a good idea.
Back in the real world - any government or large org can do a genuinely good thing so badly that it would have been better if they'd done nothing at all.
And it's been many a decade since the British gov't had much of a reputation for competence.
One more tiny piece of the global system of international order falling apart.
There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. Now that is not considered safe. Now steel production has to be protected because nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
It will happen slowly but piece by piece things will move and we will all pay a cost for it.
> There was a time when people would have felt safe enough to rely on the multiplicity of strongly allied nations with steel production capability. [...] nations that were previously considered reliable strategic partners no longer are behaving that way.
Is this supposed to be referring to the US? Because as far as I know USA has never really exported much steel to the UK at all. It's an importer of British steel.
Maybe it's referring to European allies? Or South Korea?
Steel production is on the decline in most first world nations. In case of a large-scale war there simply wouldn't be a lot of surplus to send Britain's way
it makes strategic sense to retain the full verticaly integrated industrial capacity to make anything. but financialy , Britain has zero chance of bieng competitive on the open market
yeah, free trade. chinese save a shit company and then UK force take it.
Perfect! Now do the same for the banking and financial sector, the chemistry industry, big pharma, energy, water
We did do that for banking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_Kingdom_bank_rescu...
> There is plenty of surplus labor available with the right economic incentives.
Instead the “Economic incentives” go to the Chinese owners who then learn that Americans are not interested in working in a sweatshop and instead rely on third parties to supply them with illegal workers and engage in white collar crime.
I’m suspicious of “re-industrialization” pushes because everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s resulted in at best a foreign company given massive tax breaks to create a few hundred low paid button pusher jobs and maybe a handful of better paying technician jobs.
Tangent: disturbing to see the BBC thinking they're going to get far by paywalling quasi-randomly in North America. At least right now it's trivial to ignore.
Disturbing? In what sense? Other news sources are paywalled and UK citizens have to pay in tax.
Wait what? Is the NYT not paywalled somewhere?
I'm not seeing this particular paywall, but disturbing in that the BBC is so awful and stupid at this, presumably.
For many years I would have gladly paid the BBC $20/mo for some way to legally watch Top Gear and Doctor Who. That's it, just two shows and I'll give you more than I give Netflix. They never offered a single legal mechanism available to US citizens, so, well.....don't admit to crimes on the internet and all that.
Have you tried BritBox? It seems to show Doctor Who, but ironically, being in the UK I'm unable to access their site to see specific details.
It was offered much later than iPlayer was for the UK, but to claim they 'never' had an option for US audiences is false when they have had Britbox for almost 10 years
Not only was Britbox launched long after iPlayer and after I stopped watching both of the shows I mentioned (in fact, Top Gear in its 2002 incarnation was functionally off the air before Britbox launched), but the BBC sold their streaming rights to those two programs such that their modern incarnations were never, so far as I'm aware, available on Britbox.
An increasing proportion of UK citizens are deciding not to pay for a TV licence that funds the BBC as consumption patterns have changed.
The BBC will be a zombie in 10 years unless they stop being emotionally driven and sort out their funding.
Good. The BBC is no longer the shining beacon of objective reporting it once was. Let it die and be replaced by something better.
Presumably you get your news content from Rupert Murdoch, the Daily Mail and UK News?
For what it's worth, I stopped paying the license fee because of how the BBC sucked up to the Tories in the lead up to the 2019 GE. From Newsnight displaying images of Corbyn that made him look like a Soviet stooge, to Laura Kuenssberg leaking postal vote ballot information, to Alex Forsyth saying that Boris Johnson "deserves" the election.
People say that it's subject to complaints of bias from both sides of the spectrum, but I've yet to see comparable concrete pro-left examples.
> how the BBC sucked up to the Tories in the lead up to the 2019 GE
> Laura Kuenssberg
ughh yes so glad that era is behind us. Good riddance.
I don't know whether this is a joke or not, because she's still there.
She is not Political Editor of BBC anymore. She's just a talk show host as I understand it (though still on a HEFTY salary - £410k, fourth highest in the BBC).
Presumably a very difference sphere of influence.
Here's the BBC wanting you to feel that autistic people are scary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934982
Don't spout shite. The BBC report is objectively what the defence stated in court: namely that their defendant was autistic.
If you've a problem with that, take it up with the lawyers.
If everybody thinks you’re biased, you’re probably not biased at all.
Look at how the BBC reports on the Middle East and tell me you agree with it.
That doesn't address anything unless you stake out and back up your position. Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel advocates both accuse the BBC of bias towards the other side.
Objectively, the BBC downplays what the USA and Israel do over there and doesn't downplay what Hamas and Iran do over there.
The annoying thing about the BBC paywall is that it is implemented by using different domains, so (for example here) people in the UK go to bbc.com instead of bbc.co.uk
Do you have that the wrong way round? In the UK, you go to bbc.co.uk (and bbc.com redirects to bbc.co.uk). From memory, in the US you get pushed to bbc.com.
I mean that, for example the link here is to bbc.com, and it does not recirect me to bbc.co.uk
It redirects me fine.
I had JS off. If I turn JS on it redirects me. Not "fine" though as it loads the page on bbc.com and then redirects which is slow and annoying.
Tangent: disturbing to see many North American news sites thinking they're going to get far by region-blocking European visitors because they don't want to be GDPR compliant ;)
> In March, the National Audit Office released a report noting that the Scunthorpe steelworks was costing the government about £1.3m a day.
No, BBC, the government doesn't have money. It costs the net taxpayer that much a day.
When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
the pedantry here isn't helpful, as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use.
I understand that frustration about frivolous spending. It would be better if the argument was on how we evolve and change the steel market here in the UK so its self funding.
BUT!
the whole discourse about "government shouldn't choose winners" is a bit flawed, because we have left it to business to invest in infra, and mostly they've just outsourced to someone else (who's government actually planned with an industrial strategy)
> When I buy something, it doesn't cost my employer, it costs me.
If someone takes something from you by force and spends it, they're spending your money.
> as its "not other peoples money" is a monetary system that the government lets us use
The government doesn't "let" us use it. If we don't use it (e.g. by swapping services directly) then the government gets annoyed and tries to insert taxable transactions into that direct value swap. It makes us use it.
GBP is a fiat currency issued by government through government spending and destroyed by government through taxation, it does not cost the taxpayer it's at worst a bad allocation of resources or incentivization of resource allocation.
The government has its own money. For example from national owned companies like airlines, mines, factories etc
Richest countries have a lot of government owned companies. USA is just an anomaly because of Chicago school of economy.
This is a common myth spreaded by free market freaks.