Former Conservative cabinet minister Sir John Redwood has shared his "worry for the taxpayer" after Labour stepped in to save British Steel and the company announced it will end consultation on up to 2,700 redundancies.Between 2,000 and 2,700 jobs had been at risk under the consultation launched by the company's Chinese owners.READ THE FULL STORY HERE
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00:00Former Conservative Cabinet's Minister Sir John Redwood. Sir John, a pleasure to have your esteem complete as always, but especially today.
00:08Where do you stand, Sir John, on the spectrum of we need key strategic sovereign industries and the fact the taxpayer is now footing a bill of some 700 grand a day?
00:20Yes, we need strategic industries. No, it was wrong to have plans to kill off all our virgin steel making and replace it with electric arcs.
00:27My worry is that this is a convenience to get Labour through May the 1st and some difficult elections in the area.
00:35And I'd like to know how long the promise is to these workers that these jobs are going to be supported by large amounts of taxpayer money.
00:43Because I think their plan is still to close these blast furnaces and replace it with an electric arc furnace, which will be much less job intensive and will mean we don't have the full spectrum of things we can do with the qualities of steel we can make.
00:57So there's no substitute, I think, for a proper agreement with the existing owners, the Chinese, to get us out of that.
01:06Because I think there's a lot of muddle over who pays the bills and who cashes up the money at the end when the Chinese finally waved out and we have a proper nationalisation.
01:16And I think there's a lack of clarity over where they're going to find private capital from.
01:21Because as Chris has rightly said, these are very old blast furnaces and they haven't been relined any time soon either.
01:28And when you reline, that's a big job. You've got to close the furnace down, start again on the inside of it.
01:33So that's a big, expensive job and an interruption to your production.
01:38Where are the plans for all of that? Because if they don't have plans for that, they're not actually serious about keeping these blast furnaces other than in the short term.
01:47And why are we still not getting an accurate estimate from the Treasury or best estimate from the Treasury of what this is going to cost?
01:54They should know because they've been poring over the books of this company ever since they got into power.
01:59And I wonder, Sir John, do you find it ironic that there is this competitive nature to be the most socialist?
02:09And as far as we've got the likes of Nigel Farage and Richard Tice adopting the position of Jeremy Corbyn and now Sir Keir Starmer has waved it in.
02:16They want to nationalise things. Who'd have thought that political extremes, opposites, if you like, would suddenly meet in the middle?