Closed: The Workshop of the World

13 hours ago
5 min read

Jim Chimirie

March 10, 2026

The Workshop of the World Chose to Close

Britain did not lose its industrial base. It dismissed it. There is a difference, and it matters, because one is tragedy and the other is a choice.

Britain invented the industrial age. It mined the coal, smelted the steel, built the ships and laid the pipes. It did not inherit these capabilities from a more productive civilisation. It created them. For the better part of two centuries, the physical infrastructure of British life was built and maintained by British hands, from British ground. The country knew how to keep itself alive.

It has spent the last thirty years methodically dismantling that knowledge. Not because the resources ran out. Britain has gas beneath its own sea floor right now. It has the geology for gas storage. It had blast furnaces capable of producing virgin steel until last year. The resources did not disappear. The will to use them did.

The consequences of that choice are no longer theoretical. This week, with Middle East supplies disrupted and Goldman Sachs warning that oil prices could breach the peaks of 2008 and 2022, Britain found itself with 1.5 days of gas in reserve. Europe had several weeks. Britain stores between 2 and 6 percent of its annual gas demand. Germany stores 25 to 30 percent. France and Italy around 20 percent. The gap exists because successive governments pulled funding from storage infrastructure and watched it collapse. They assumed the gas would always be flowing.

It is not flowing now. And Britain has nothing to fall back on. It must outbid rivals for every tanker that docks. Traders know this. The UK gas hub price has moved above the main European benchmark all the way to the end of May. Britain is not a victim of market forces. It is a country that voluntarily removed every buffer between its population and the market, and is now surprised to find itself at the market's mercy.

Steel tells the same story in a different register. Scunthorpe's blast furnaces are gone. Port Talbot's primary steelmaking is gone. Britain is now the only G7 country that cannot produce virgin steel, a distinction it shares with no comparable nation on earth. Energy minister Sarah Jones told a parliamentary committee that Britain needs virgin steel. She said yes, on the record, when asked directly. The government let the last of it go anyway. The carbon taxes applied to domestic producers but not to imports until 2027 are not a technicality. They are a policy that made British steel unviable while foreign steel entered the market untouched. The industry was made to fail.

Ed Miliband appeared on the BBC to explain that Britain had been left at the mercy of international energy markets. He has been Energy Secretary since July. The North Sea licences his government has declined to issue, the storage his department has not built: these are his decisions now. Jon Butterworth, chief executive of National Gas, wrote to him directly warning that keeping the lights on would require three new storage facilities or six giant LNG barges. Miliband's department said it was confident in security of supply. There are 1.5 days of gas in the system.

The political class that made these decisions will not have gone cold this winter. They will not lose jobs in Scunthorpe. They will not face the mortgage pressure that Mohamed El-Erian warned about on Radio 4, when he said the average British person would be hit from multiple sides, on energy, on borrowing costs, on the price of goods across every supply chain that runs through the Strait of Hormuz.

The consequences of three decades of voluntary de-industrialisation will land, as they always do, on people who had no vote on the strategy and no seat at the table when it was designed.

Images via Author

Jim is, as usual, very close to the rub of things. But I would add something more.

Many people will automatically (by going back 30 years) pin the blame on Margaret Thatcher's era - that's actually more than 30 years - but what they fail to recognise is why her government pursued the mass privatisations they did.

The reasons are simple to grasp; successive governments post WW2 failed to support nationalised industries and by the time Thatcher became PM, the UK was in dire straits financially. The country simply did not have the money needed to upgrade anything. To do so would have meant punitive taxation, much like we see now from the present government.

So Thatcher's solution was to privatise everything.

Did it work? Up to a point, yes, but what she failed to do was future-proof and safeguard those privatisations from eventually being hived off as they have been.

That was the mistake - not the privatisations themselves and of themselves. That is why the UK is now in the situation described so accurately by Jim above.

Kevan James

Labour waffle on about creating new clean green jobs. Not one of them has any production experience, a government of lawyers, lecturers, admins, activists, and union officials. Clueless. The Tories weren’t much better, nearly all ‘professionals’ rather than industrial experts.

Peter Coglan

Peter, you've put your finger on something that rarely gets said plainly enough.

You cannot design an industrial strategy if you have never run a factory, managed a supply chain or understood what it actually takes to produce something physical. The current cabinet is composed almost entirely of people whose careers have been built on argument, administration and advocacy.

Those are not useless skills. But they are not the skills that build things. Clean green jobs is a slogan, not a plan. Real industrial recovery means real industry: manufacturing, energy production, construction, engineering. Jobs with weight to them, that produce something tangible, that anchor communities, that cannot be outsourced to a laptop in another country. Those jobs do not emerge from a government white paper.

They require capital, energy, land, planning reform and a political class willing to prioritise output over optics. The Tories were guilty of the same professionalisation of politics. But this government has taken it further, combining ignorance of industry with an ideological commitment to a green transition that is removing the foundations industry needs before the replacement is anywhere near ready.

Labour went into the election promising to "fix the foundations". They've spent the past twenty months digging them up.

Jim Chimirie

What’s your view?

Use the Contact Form below

and have your say.

User names are okay.

email our Letters Page

Your name, Town or City and County of residence

are required.

These can be withheld from publication if you ask.