Net Zero Is a Slogan: Reality Is Made of Steel

There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a steel town when the furnaces go cold. It is not peaceful. It is the heavy, suffocating silence of abandonment, the silence of promises broken and communities hollowed out.

In October 2015, that silence descended on Redcar. SSI UK’s steelworks collapsed into liquidation. More than 2,000 skilled workers lost their livelihoods. The second-largest blast furnace in Europe, a 365-foot monument to a century of industrial heritage, fell dormant. By 2021, even that monument was gone, demolished in a controlled explosion that lasted seconds but echoed across generations.

Now, on that very same scarred earth, a new noise is beginning. It is the sound of construction for the Net Zero Teesside Power project, the flagship of Labour’s green industrial revolution. The joint venture between BP and Equinor promises regeneration, promises jobs, promises renewal.

Yet as the structure rises from the rubble of British steelmaking, it reveals a detail so grotesque it would be dismissed as satire were it not verifiable fact. The structural steel frames holding up this monument to British renewal are not British at all.

They are Chinese.

The Anatomy of Corporate Plunder

The facts are stark and damning. The Net Zero Teesside Power project plans to import approximately 10,000 tonnes of structural steelwork from China, in a contract package worth around £30 million. Some reports indicate a smaller initial tranche of 7,000 tonnes for £5 million, but the full structural package tells the fuller story of what is being offshored.

The British Constructional Steelwork Association calculates that this single contract could sustain roughly 600 skilled British fabrication workers for an entire year. Instead, the work has gone to Modern Heavy Industries in Shanghai.

Just miles away at Lackenby, British Steel’s Teesside Beam Mill stands ready and willing. The UK’s only producer of large structural steel sections for the building industry has capacity, capability, and a workforce desperate for orders. Further south in Scunthorpe, British Steel’s operations cling to survival, waiting for the contracts that might keep them viable.

Yet Technip Energies, the French contractor managing this package, looked at the spreadsheet and ticked a different box. The Chinese bid was cheaper. The decision was made. The jobs were lost before they were even offered. Chinese steel on the ashes of Redcar, justified by spreadsheets and waved through by ministers who promise concern after the fact.

The Anatomy of a Betrayal

This is why people no longer trust the language of transition. Because behind the green branding sits the same old model: globalised supply chains, weakened labour, and communities told to be grateful for whatever scraps fall their way.

We must strip away the marketing language to understand what this really means. This project is supposedly designed to decarbonise Britain. Yet before it has generated a single watt of low-carbon electricity, it has already front-loaded its carbon ledger with an estimated 4,000 tonnes of avoidable CO2 emissions from shipping fabricated steel thousands of miles across the ocean from China.

This is not environmentalism. This is accountancy masquerading as morality, with a green ribbon tied around industrial surrender.

The Ledger That Lies

Why does this happen? Not by accident. Not through oversight. It happens because of rigid adherence to a neoliberal economic orthodoxy that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The decision-makers at BP, Equinor, and their subcontractors followed standard procurement rules to the letter. They looked at the immediate cost per tonne. The Chinese steel was cheaper on paper. The contract was awarded. Box ticked. Bonus secured.

But this calculation is a fraud. It externalises every cost that matters.

A sane economy would calculate the lost income tax from unemployed British workers. It would calculate the unemployment benefits that the state must now pay. It would calculate the regional economic multiplier from wages spent in local shops, pubs, and services. It would calculate the strategic cost of losing the industrial capacity to manufacture our own critical infrastructure.

When you factor in these costs, which fall not on BP’s balance sheet but on the public purse, British steel is the bargain. Chinese steel becomes ruinously expensive.

But under our current system, the company externalises the social cost while privatising the financial saving. This is not capitalism. This is corporate parasitism, feeding off a host economy while killing it from within.

The False Comfort of “Global Britain”

Defenders of this arrangement will wheel out the usual bureaucratic sedatives. They will invoke “global competitiveness” and “open markets.” They will point out that the Net Zero Teesside project claims to have “over 50 per cent UK content overall,” as if this percentage game makes the betrayal more palatable.

They will warn against “protectionism,” that great bogeyman deployed whenever British workers dare suggest that British infrastructure might be built with British materials.

These arguments collapse under the gentlest scrutiny.

France would not allow a flagship nuclear project to be built with foreign steel if French foundries could cast it. The United States, under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, aggressively linked green infrastructure funding to domestic manufacturing content requirements. Germany protects its industrial base through sophisticated state coordination. Even China, whose steel we are importing, would never dream of building strategic infrastructure with foreign materials when domestic capacity exists.

Only in Britain do we treat our own industrial base with such contempt. Only here do we confuse self-harm with economic sophistication.

Even Ben Houchen, the Conservative Mayor of Tees Valley and usually a reliable cheerleader for regeneration, has called this decision “a betrayal that beggars belief.” He is correct, though perhaps he fails to see the deeper irony. This is not an aberration. This is the logical endpoint of the very free-market fundamentalism his party championed for four decades. You cannot worship the invisible hand for generations and then complain when it decides to build Teesside out of Shanghai steel.

Green Veneer on Rotten Foundations

This exposes the dirty secret of the “Net Zero” agenda as it is currently managed. It is not an industrial strategy. It is not an industrial strategy. It is a financial product. A financial product, designed to generate returns for multinational corporations while providing political cover for managed decline.

Real decarbonisation would require shorter supply chains, not longer ones. It would mean making things here, using increasingly clean British energy, to build British infrastructure. It would treat steelmaking not as a legacy embarrassment to be quietly euthanised, but as a strategic pillar of both national security and economic sovereignty.

Instead, we have what might be called “Net Offshoring.” We export our emissions to China so we can claim to be green at home. We export our wages so corporations can claim “value for money” on quarterly earnings calls. We export our industrial capacity so ministers can stand in front of construction sites and talk about levelling up.

The people of Redcar were told in 2015, as their steelworks died, to look forward to a high-tech green future. They were promised that the pain of deindustrialisation was a necessary prelude to reindustrialisation. They were told that Teesside would be at the forefront of Britain’s Net Zero revolution.

What they are actually getting is a monument to globalisation built on the grave of their own industry, held together with Chinese steel that their grandfathers’ generation would have made themselves.

The workers who lost their jobs in 2015 were not consultants who could retrain as app developers. They were skilled tradesmen whose expertise was forged over generations. They were part of an industrial ecosystem that, once destroyed, cannot be simply wished back into existence with ministerial press releases.

A Legacy Written in Steel

We must stop accepting the lie that Britain can build a green economy on the foundations of industrial surrender. If this Labour government is serious about Net Zero, if it genuinely believes in industrial strategy rather than just industrial theatre, it must mandate that publicly funded infrastructure projects use British materials wherever possible.

Not as a suggestion. Not as a target. As a condition of the licence to operate.

Until such measures are implemented, projects like Net Zero Teesside Power will stand as symbols of profound failure. They are shiny, modern, and ostensibly green. But scratch the paint, and you find the same old rot beneath.

We are not greening the economy. We are merely exporting the smoke, along with the jobs, the wages, and the last shreds of industrial self-respect.

The silence that fell over Redcar in 2015 was supposed to be temporary. Instead, it is being made permanent by a political class that has confused capitulation with progress. The furnaces went cold. But the betrayal burns on, forged now in Chinese steel on British soil, it isn’t climate policy. It’s class policy.