It’s the end of an era: the last steelworks in the UK, the motherland and once a pioneer of industrialization, is on the verge of shutting down. British Steel, which has been supported by Chinese funding since 2020 and has received daily subsidies of £700,000 from its Chinese owner, announced the closure of its two remaining blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, England, last week. For now, “consultations” are underway, which will determine whether the furnaces will be extinguished in June or September of this year, with the end seemingly decided, even if unions still fight to delay the closure and the operator hopes for government aid.
With this, the country that initiated the industrial revolution with coal, steel, steam engines and railways in the 19th century will no longer produce its own steel. Since the closure of many steelworks in the 1970s and 1980s and the privatization of British Steel during the Thatcher era, the industry has been a shadow of its former self.
The United Kingdom is thus the first and so far the only G7 country unable to produce its own steel. As an old pop song says, “Don’t be sad, you won’t be alone for long.”
England is also the birthplace of blast furnaces: Henry Bessemer’s invention in 1856, later perfected by other engineers and replaced, transformed molten iron quickly and cheaply into steel, giving the industrial revolution a new boost. In Scunthorpe, located south of Leeds, the first blast furnace was commissioned in 1890, making the city, along with Sheffield and South Wales, the third major steel industry hub in the UK.
In the 1950s, over 300,000 Britons worked in the steel industry. In the early 1970s, the UK produced 25 million tons of steel per year, but then the decline began. Cheaper steel, first from Japan, then from China, made British steelworks uncompetitive. The second half of the 1970s and the 1980s saw a massacre: works were closed, jobs disappeared. The blast furnaces in Port Talbot were shut down in 2024, leaving Scunthorpe as the last remaining work. Until now.
The rest were given to British steelworkers by Donald Trump’s tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports to the USA – according to UK Steel, the last remaining export market, worth £400 million. With Chinese and American steel, Europeans, including the British, can hardly compete at all, given high carbon taxes, record-breaking electricity prices and demands for electric arc furnaces instead of cheaper coal-fired heating, let alone the Trump tariffs that now make it impossible. And nationally, there is hardly any demand in the “motherland of industry” where deindustrialization has long been advanced.