When Tony Gosling was a boy in Scunthorpe, each night his bedroom would be aglow with orange, red and yellow. These lights, which danced and flickered around his room, came from the town’s monolithic steelworks. They set him on a course that four generations of his family had followed before him. At 16 he joined British Steel as an apprentice and, bar a short stint in the army, has worked there ever since. When Gosling was growing up in the 1970s, everybody living on his road in north Scunthorpe was a steelworker, except the local vicar. In fact, if someone had told him their dad didn’t “work at the steelers”, Gosling would have thought them quite odd.
The steelworks in Scunthorpe predate the town; the smelting of steel in the mid 19th century gave rise to a settlement in this corner of North Lincolnshire, which in time became Scunthorpe. The local football club is nicknamed “the Iron”, and Scunthorpe’s motto – “The heavens reflect our labours” – refers to the glow of the steelworks that lit up Gosling’s bedroom.
But over the past four decades, Scunthorpe’s pride in its industrial heritage has been subjected to a series of knocks. Since British Steel was privatised by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, Scunthorpe – and the UK steel industry more widely – has been in decline, characterised by redundancies, frequently changing ownership, and allegations of mismanagement. Where once the plant had four blast furnaces, each named after a queen of England (Mary, Victoria, Anne and, after Elizabeth I, Bess), now only two remain.
Blast furnaces use coke – a coal-based fuel – to smelt iron from iron ore, which is then converted into steel. They were invented by Abraham Darby in Shropshire in 1709 and have been used to make steel for more than 300 years. After the closure of the blast furnaces at Tata Steel’s plant in Port Talbot, South Wales, last September, Scunthorpe’s Queen Anne and Queen Bess are the last to remain in the UK.
British Steel’s owner, the Chinese company Jingye, is considering the furnaces’ future. One option is to replace them with a new, greener electric arc furnace, following the example of Tata Steel. With the UK moving towards clean power, British Steel seems confident that opening a new electric arc furnace will safeguard steel production in line with net zero targets. (There are also embedded costs in continuing to rely on a fuel that is to become more scarce and more expensive.) But the workforce required to operate electric arc furnaces is far smaller than for blast furnaces, and if British Steel closes the remaining blast furnaces, thousands of jobs will be lost.
When I visited Scunthorpe over two bitterly cold days in January, I found a town in the grip of an identity crisis. Scunthorpe doesn’t get many visitors: it is certainly not a tourist hot spot (the rapper Tinie Tempah has famously “never been”) and, like so many initially industrial towns, it lacks the bustle and buzz of a thriving town centre. Scunthorpe is a monotown: its entire economy has been built on steel.
In a coffee shop on the high street, I spoke to Sam Ashton, who – like many in Scunthorpe – has family ties to British Steel’s site in the town. “If the steelworks go, then Scunthorpe will go,” she told me. Her brother, father and both grandparents have all worked at the steelworks. She is concerned that if the plant continues its decline, the effects for the town will be devastating. More than one person I spoke to on my visit – including Ashton – said they worried that without the employment provided by the steelworks, Scunthorpe would “become a ghost town”.
The uncertain future of British Steel’s last blast furnaces is already having an effect on those working on site and many – particularly engineers – have made the decision to leave. Martin Foster, a full-time convener for Unite and third-generation steelworker, picked me up from the station and drove me to his offices on site, pointing out the four looming blast furnaces on our way.
Foster, who deals with British Steel and Jingye on a regular basis, is (predictably) unimpressed by how they have treated the steelworks since their takeover in March 2020. To him, the companies are the latest iteration in a series of poor ownership. “Successive owners, rather than invest money in modernising and keeping us competitive, have just sucked what money they could out and [done] the bare minimum to keep the dragon breathing,” he told me. “As a result, we’ve now reached a point where the plant is, in some areas, literally falling apart around us.”
Foster is nostalgic for an era in which working as an engineer for British Steel in Scunthorpe was a rewarding profession. Today, that is no longer the case. “We’re not such a lucrative company to work for any more. Engineering-wise, we’re below the average pay,” Foster said. “Is it any wonder we’re losing engineers when they can get better pay elsewhere?”
The decline of British Steel and the potential closure of the last remaining blast furnaces is not just a problem for Scunthorpe and its workforce. It raises wider questions for the UK’s steel-making capacity. Rob Waltham, the Conservative leader of North Lincolnshire Council, told me that keeping at least one blast furnace open is a matter of national security. “We can’t afford to lose that sovereign steel-making capacity that we get out of British steel being made here in Scunthorpe.”
Speaking to me from his office in Westminster the day before my trip, Nic Dakin, Scunthorpe’s Labour MP, agreed. There is no “green future” without steel, which is essential for infrastructure, electric vehicles and even mobile phones. “Do you buy steel from abroad and become dependent on other countries?” asked Dakin. “We’ve seen problems with the Ukraine war over [energy] dependency – that’s the same for steel.”
This poses a challenge for Labour. British Steel and Jingye are reportedly seeking £500m in subsidies to keep the blast furnaces running and to upgrade to cleaner technology. If Keir Starmer’s government cannot find a more sustainable solution, others will capitalise on the problem.
Reform is already moving in this space; its deputy leader, Richard Tice, said in 2024 that the party would renationalise the steel industry (a move no one I spoke to in Scunthorpe held up as a silver bullet). Andrea Jenkyns, the former Conservative cabinet minister who is now running as the Reform candidate for Lincolnshire mayor, believes “red tape is making the industry locally insecure”. Jenkyns told me that in government her party would deregulate to speed up the steel-making process (although it is unclear how this aligns with Tice’s plans for nationalisation).
For Rob Waltham, whose father cashed in his British Steel pension to send him to university, this is an emotional issue. “People in Scunthorpe are attached to [the UK] having our own steel production.” Emotions don’t save money, nor do they reinvent jobs – but they do win votes. If Labour looks away from the slow decline of British industry, or forgoes a just transition in the pursuit of clean power, it will find that towns like Scunthorpe take their votes elsewhere.
[See also: The peace paradox]
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This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War