LABOUR has landed itself in a steel crisis of its own making.
Nationalisation should be a last resort, but steel is vital for our security, resilience and economy.
Yesterday laid bare the madness at the heart of Labour’s steel policy, and the incompetence which seems endemic to their government.
As with many of their policies, they don’t have a plan. They have been left scrambling for a solution and the future for British steelmaking now hangs the balance because of them.
History often has a habit of repeating itself.
Neil Kinnock once pointed out the stupidity of ‘hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’, and Labour’s eco madness has hit similar heights.
Red Ed Miliband closed our last coal mine months ago, only to then be forced into importing coal from abroad to keep the Scunthorpe blast furnaces open.
Net Zero will not work in its current form. And this government continuing to peddle its dogma is putting things like our steel industry at risk.
Of course, we all want to stop climate change.
But, given Britain only contributes to 1 per cent of global emissions, the best way to do that is by having a thriving private sector which can innovate and develop cutting-edge technology.
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It’s businesses, not the state that will do this. But clearly this hasn’t yet dawned on Keir Starmer.
Now the wheels are coming off for Keir Starmer. Having broken over 100 promises since becoming Labour leader, he once again proved he is the master of saying one thing and doing the opposite.
He now says ‘the world as we knew it has gone’, claiming we are in a different world. In some ways he is right, but only because he lives in a completely different world to the one the rest of us do.
He is completely out of touch and needs to get real.
On the economy, on tariffs and Net Zero he can’t stop scoring own goals. He must urgently change course.
If Starmer meant what he said about living in a new world, he would be able to see sense as the Conservative Party have on Net Zero.
The PM must admit that Net Zero by 2050 is impossible without crippling businesses and punishing families with higher costs and higher bills.
Stamer’s much-vaunted electric vehicle changes, which only brought us closer to where we were a year ago, is tinkering at the edges.
Continuing to enforce extra levies, increasing burdens on businesses and shackling industry with sales bans, these minor changes are just not equal to the challenge.
It’s about time the PM used Brexit to our advantage. We all know Starmer is an arch Remoaner.
He energetically campaigned for a second referendum, and he voted to block the UK making its own laws 48 times in Parliament.
But as the result of Brexit he’s been dealt a good hand of cards and now is his chance to seriously play it in the national interest.
Given his Chancellor has crushed growth, a US trade deal would be the ultimate prize.
For anyone who doesn’t have a thinly veiled desire to rejoin the EU, this deal would unleash opportunities for British businesses to benefit from international trade like never before.
We laid the foundations for it, negotiating with President Trump in his first term. Now he’s back in the White House, the appetite for it in Washington is there.
Starmer must pick up and dust off what we’ve already hammered out.
But, despite tariffs hammering our car sector and punishing British businesses, they seem very half hearted.
Labour ministers, more focused on hating Trump than helping Britain, took five months to even begin face to face talks.
They lost the services of Britain’s top trade negotiator, and they wasted time cosying up to the EU with nothing to show for it.
Try as they might to blame everyone else for our economic woes, common sense readers of the Sun will see through it.
Labour has trashed the economy, sent taxes to record highs and tried to strangle businesses in reams of red tape.
Brexit could be Britain’s life jacket, but the Prime Minister won’t wear it. He must put his partisan instincts aside and act in the national interest.
The final nail in the coffin is Labour’s punishing tax regime.
Already, we have seen an exodus of the innovators, the risk takers and the entrepreneurs. Not to mention salaries being slashed, 25,000 job losses and counting and inflation ticking up.
Yet Starmer dogmatically ploughs on, his words increasingly divorced from reality.
It’s a classic case of government by press release – style over substance, slogans over solutions.
What we need now is honesty about the challenges we face, and the courage to make decisions that actually solve them.
But that’s not how the current occupants of Downing Street operate.
Keir Starmer is stuck in the past. A politician more comfortable recycling old ideas than generating new ones.
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He hasn’t evolved. And unless he does, it’s the rest of us who will pay the price: higher taxes, lost jobs, soaring bills, and a weakened economy.
Britain deserves better than managed decline masked as progress. If Starmer truly believes we’re living in a new world, then it’s time he started acting like it.
