I don't believe it! I was not allowed to print S****horpe in my post because of the letters in the middle. What do residents of S****horpe do to get around that when online?????!!!

Unfortunately, British Steel hasn’t belonged to Britain for many years. The rot started in 1988 when a 13-week national strike took place over pay. The workforce shrunk from 142,000 in 1980 to 52,000 in 1988. Just been reading the facts about this.

In 1988 British Steel was privatised, and the heavy losses of the 70s and early 80s were reversed with the company making a pre-tax profit of £733 in 1989.

In 1992 as the UK slid into recession, British Steel announced the closure of its Ravenscraig steel plant leading to a loss of 1800 jobs and ending steelmaking in Scotland.

In 1999 British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens of the Netherlands merge to create Corus Group, the biggest steel-maker in Europe and the third largest in the world.

In 2000 Corus said it planned to slash the workforce by 4,500 after losing £20m a month. The number employed by the UK steel industry falls to just over 30,000.

In 2007 Corus is bought by India’s Tata Steel, but higher energy prices and cheaper imports create tough trading conditions.

In 2015 Deteriorating marketing conditions saw the closure of big plants in Redcar, S****horpe, Scotland and South Wales. Employees voted to strike for the first time in three decades over plans to axe their pension scheme, but called off the action after a deal was reached. Unions blamed the Gov’t for high energy costs, crippling business rates, and for failing to press the EU to stem the tide of Chinese imports.

Private equity firm Greybull Capital purchased Tata Steel’s European Long Products for the princely sum of just £1, and revived the name of British Steel It offered a lifeline to 4,800 mostly UK-based employees and put together a £400m investment package for business, based at the S****horpe plant in Northern England.

The bulk of the UK steel industry remained under Tata’s ownership, including the UK’s largest steel plant, Port Talbot in Wales.

In 2017 the reborn British Steel returned to profit, its best performance in a decade, after losses of £79m a year earlier.

In 2018 Greybull looked to expand British Steel, including a bid for a US produer of carbon and alloy wire. The UK steel sector faced threats from increased US tariffs, though damage was cushioned by Europe adopting retaliatory measures.

In April 2019 British Steel made a plea for a £120m loan from the UK government to plug a shortfall in credits owed to the European Commission for carbon emissions.

In May 2019 the company entered into insolvency proceedings, putting the future of thousands of jobs in doubt.

In August 2019 Rescue deal for British Steel in sight after Ataer Holding, a Turkish investment group owned by the country’s military pension fund, reaches provisional agreement for a takeover.

October 2019 - Ataer walks away after a failure to agree terms.

November 2019 - British Steel rescued by Chinese industrial conglomerate, Jingye.

We don’t own a piece of it anymore.

Thanks ever so much for that Shropshiregirl, it appears that British Steel have had it tough all along, not just from the EU but our own government too. It's like the British government deliberately wanted to sabotage the industry with expensive energy costs, carbon emission penalties, and allowing cheap imports of 'Chinese Steel'....It makes you think that the Chinese were after British Steel all along by undercutting them and making them unprofitable and then buying them out for next to nowt'..

It certainly puts Donald Trumps idea of placing tariffs on Chinese steel to protect his own countries steel industry into perspective.
I remember watching a documentary about Hull docks back in the eighties or nineties, the dock workers were loading Sheffield Stainless Steel onto ships bound for Sweden, a few weeks later the same steel was returned to the UK with stickers on stating 'Swedish Stainless Steel' Except in their rush to sell it back at twice the price, someone had got lazy and just placed the new stickers over the previous ones....

Another reason we need to leave the EU. The carbon emissions penalties imposed by the EU on British Steel have made it way too difficult for it to be competitive, especially when the EU allowed China to dump massive amounts of cheap steel into Europe to help with the cost of Merkels cars.

The bigger problem as I see it is that, the UK needs its own steel industry. If the UK was to be at war (for whatever reason) then it would need to rely on its own steel industry to manufacture ships, tanks, aircraft etc. Thanks to the EU and its stupid carbon tax policy, the UK, once again has its ability to defend itself and support itself eroded by Brussels.

We would have been shafted in the two world wars without being able to manufacture our own stuff Bread.
And chances are, nobody else is paying the carbon tax, certainly not the Chinese, no wonder they can undercut us.

Yep ...

We have reduced our carbon footprint more than any other country in the EU.

Hi

Another side to the Carbon Tax Fiasco

https://www.ft.com/content/832027d4-...a-fdd51850994c

British Steel sold them before asking for a loan.

The Carbon Tax is EU Wide, so no disadvantage to the UK over the rest of the EU.

We have had a succession of Governments who really could not be bothered about Manufacturing, and that is our problem.

I am looking forward to leaving as our bunch of prats will have nobody else to blame then.