David Smith

Forty years ago in this place, the Conservative Minister of Trade and Industry said: “I believe that…privatisation will enable”— British Steel— “and its work force to…secure a firmly based competitive industry with a long-term future”. In the same debate, the then Labour shadow Minister asked whether the Minister has “not rewarded British Steel…with a plan which quite unnecessarily places its future in jeopardy?”—[Official Report, 3 December 1987; Vol. 123, c. 1107.] Today, I think we can conclude that that privatisation did indeed place British Steel in jeopardy and that privatisation has left Britain’s steel industry dangerously exposed. In the post-war period, railways, steel, mines and mills covered the country in a thicket of industry, but for ideological reasons the Conservatives tore those networks apart, with the result that in my North Northumberland constituency, the electricity grid is owned by Warren Buffett, the water system is overseen from Hong Kong, and the buses are ultimately run out of Miami. We have the chance to correct this with British steelmaking, and that is what we are trying to do today. This matters because national security is about much more than defence; it is about trust, mutuality and our common endeavour.