U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer—Lead Warhawk of the Coalition of the Willing for arms to Ukraine—has called an emergency session of the Parliament for tomorrow, the first such session in four years. The U.K. has only two blast furnaces remaining in operation, and rush-moves to keep them open have failed so far. The British Steel furnaces, in Scunthorpe, are operated by Jingye, the Chinese firm which acquired British Steel in 2000. Jingye is losing money, and could shut the furnaces down in June, or even earlier. There is the proposal for London to nationalize the company and keep it going, but talks deadlocked this week.
If no contingency arrangements come about, Britain will have no integrated steel works at all, that is, no domestic production of virgin steel, only recycled scrap. For reference, steel output in France and Germany is about 70% virgin steel, with 30% from electric arc processing of scrap. For China, the ratio is 90 to 10. The U.K. has depended on steel imports, with Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and Belgium among its top suppliers, to supplement its domestic production which is mostly all from scrap. Two British Steel blast furnaces shut down last year.