The British steel industry has been staggering from one crisis to another for the whole of this year. Half of the industry has fallen into effective state control, and what’s left is teetering on the edge of collapse. The government has finally come up with a plan to rescue it. In collaboration with the US and EU, it wants to create a ‘ring of steel’ protecting all the major Western industries from cheap Asian imports. It sounds simple enough, but there is just one catch. This plan won’t do anything to fix soaring domestic costs – and that is the real problem.

The government certainly needs to do something to help the steel industry. It took control of British Steel, with a plant in Scunthorpe earlier this year, while Liberty Steel, with plants in Rotherham and Stocksbridge, collapsed int

See Full Page