Jonathan Reynolds says allowing British Steel to collapse would have cost £1bn as public ownership looks increasingly likely
The Reform UK leader Nigel Farage backs the nationalisation of the plant. Here are some of the main takeaways of what he said to Laura Kuenssberg this morning:
He believes nationalisation of the Scunthorpe plant is the right move because he claims the plant’s Chinese owners, Jingye, is a “bad actor”.
Farage accused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of deliberately sabotaging British Steel, but provided no evidence for his claim. “This is a big strategic decision by the CCP,” he said. Asked for his evidence to support that claim, Farage said: “You can call it intuition if you like.”
Farage said, again without evidence that he was “100% certain they bought British Steel to close British Steel”.
Farage says it is hard to estimate how much it would cost the taxpayer to nationalise British Steel “because we can’t trust Jingye’s figures” and that the company “artificially inflated” its losses and has not opened its accounts up to proper auditing.
Farage said we are living through an “industrial massacre” and a “complete rethink” about British industry is necessary to protect domestic production and interests.
The losses, the annual losses, net losses, in the last set of accounts were £233m. Actually, that can be improved upon, but I am accepting your point that we would expect to lose money on this.
I would ask the public to compare that to the option of spending a lot more money to reach a deal that would have seen a lot of job losses and Jingye remain as a partner.
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