Minister ‘confident’ that materials will arrive to keep Scunthorpe blast furnaces running
James Murray, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, has said government officials are continuing to try to get raw materials to the Scunthorpe steelworks to keep the blast furnaces there running, insisting that the supplies are in the country and he is ‘“confident” they will arrive.
Speaking to Times Radio this morning, he said government staff had been at the furnace and “Their role is to make sure we do everything we can to make sure we get those raw materials to the blast furnaces in time and to make sure they continue operating.
“The raw materials, the shipments have arrived, they’re in the UK, they’re nearby. There were questions about getting them into the blast furnaces, that is what the officials are focused on right now.”
Speaking later on the Today programme, Murray said:
I’m confident in our actions. I’m confident we’re doing everything we can to get the raw materials in there, to keep the blast furnaces going.
And the reason we need to keep going … is to give us the opportunity to make sure that steel making in the UK has a bright future. Because ultimately, we want to bring in another private sector partner to give it a sustainable future in the UK.
The MP for Ealing North was coy when pressed by Nick Robinson on the staus of raw materials, saying “We’re very clear that we want to get the raw materials in. There are limits on what I can say because of the commercial processes that are under way.”
Robinson suggested the government was concerned about suppliers potentially hiking prices if they knew how precarious the operation of the plant was.
Key events
Treasury minister James Murray has criticised previous Conservative governments for their approaches to relations with China, saying that the current Labour administration needed to be “cool-headed, clear-eyed and pragmatic” in its dealings with the country, as there were significant economic implications.
Asked outright on LBC radio if, in the wake of the British Steel crisis, the government should be treating China as a hostile state akin to Russia or Iran, Murray said “No. China is not a hostile state.”
He continued, telling listeners:
China is a country with whom we have a large important relationship. We need to be pragmatic about it and understand that we have different ways of interacting with China in different areas of our relationship.
China is the second-biggest economy in the world, fourth-biggest trading partner for the UK, and there are 450,000 jobs in Britain that depend on exports to China, so we need to engage with them.
But I think if you look at what’s happened in recent years under the previous governments it either arguably was too naive and too “not eyes open” under Cameron and Osborne, and more recently in the latter days of the previous government, there was no engagement at all.
And I think neither of those are quite the right approach. We need to be cool-headed and clear-eyed and pragmatic about this, and realise there areas where we’re going to cooperate, some where we’re going to compete and others where we’ll challenge.
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