by William Yarwood, media campaign manager
Over the weekend, social media was flooded with MPs posting selfies from trains and tubes en route to Westminster to “#saveoursteel” after Parliament was recalled to pass emergency legislation - the Steel Industry Special Measures Bill - to give the government effective control over British Steel.
What bravery. What sacrifice. Imagine giving up your Saturday to return to Parliament — a place you’re already paid handsomely to attend — to parrot some lines party HQ handed you in a briefing pack. The steelworkers must be so grateful.
Let’s get real. Over a fifth of the UK labour force works weekends - carers, nurses, shop staff, delivery drivers. None of whom expect applause for doing their job outside the standard weekday 9 - 5. But apparently, if you’re an MP, showing up to work on a Saturday now qualifies as a great sacrifice worthy of praise and adoration.
What’s truly insulting about this whole ordeal, however, is the idea that these MPs are “saving” British steel when one of the reasons the industry is on life support in the first place is down to our politicians - including many of those now grandstanding for the cameras.
The truth is that Britain’s steel sector has been slowly throttled by sky-high energy costs, thanks to this (and past) government’s obsessive pursuit of net zero. Years of piling on renewable subsidies and endless regulation have left our steelmakers paying electricity prices significantly higher than those in Germany and France.
The very MPs now demanding government intervention are the same ones who cheered on every policy that undermined domestic industry in the preceding decades. They didn’t blink when our steel was undercut by cheaper imports produced with lower environmental standards. They waved through every climate target without sparing a thought for the manufacturing jobs left behind.
And now they want to be seen as the solution?
British steel doesn’t need MPs turning up for the cameras with solidarity hashtags. It needs affordable energy. It needs policy rooted in realism and it needs politicians who don’t treat heavy industry as collateral damage in over carbon emissions.
If MPs really cared about saving steel, they’d be calling for a rollback of the punitive costs they helped impose. But that’s not what this is about. This is about politics - not principle.
Steel doesn’t need selfies. It needs a future