europeans are saying UK vetoed higher tarrifs on chinese steel imports as Cameron/Osbourne favour to the chinese and you reap what you sow

David Cameron was accused of betraying steel workers yesterday after Britain blocked an attempt to impose tougher sanctions to stop the Chinese dumping cut-price imports.

The European Commission wanted to increase the tariffs on Chinese imports to help the struggling steel industry.

But the UK government was the “ringleader” in stopping Brussels from increasing the tariffs to the same rate as the United States.

As as result the EU has only increased the import duty by just 9% on Chinese goods while the States has slapped tariffs of 66%.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid admitted he had blocked the EU from taking tougher action - even though it would have helped UK steel firms.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid admitted he had blocked the EU from taking tougher action - even though it would have helped UK steel firms.

That's because other UK firms are making the best of the cheap steel from abroad.

If they had to pay UK prices for steel we might see lots of them getting into a mess as well.

Quite right...to a point, I suspect the could use a model similar to the banks though, but what I absolutely hate is the way cameron is attempting to say whatever he needs to placate people using the language he does.
He wants in EU so doesnt say its detriment to the position and wants the public to think they are there to help the workers....when really hes there to help enterprise who want a return on investment.

Absolutely.
But people need to see that it was decisions already made that brought us to the place we are at.
They cant play a double bluff and pretend any gains they've already banked come with no downsides.

All they can do is nosh enterprise and hope for the best, but enterprise dont employ people for the good of the community.

give the steel free to British companies

you'd be lucky to get any takers

If the steel is poor quality, or manufacturing is poor that is something that can be addressed, assuming Britain is still capable of engineering and manufacturing.

We don`t give our steel away to foreign governments, we sell it. We give it away to our own country and our own British companies.

We could hack all of the eu bank reserves and pay off our deficit that way.

Tecno future.

so chine have higher tarrifs on our steel than we put on theirs.
and we let them
coming toa negotiating table near you.
lots of deals to be "re negotiated" after brexit.

peopel using royal mail as an example of how the eu destroyed us.

shameful stuff.
i know of one on here who was delighted to buy their shares yet wouldnt of been able to have done so if it wasnt for the eu.

also on that.
germany and frnace delayed the anti monopoly decision to protect their workers.
yet we went in and agreed to comply from the start.

this country is ****** up from within.
not by the eu

Kick

I do agree bb but if you understood my post it was heavily ironic quoting how the Labour minister Peter Mandelsson addressed the problem when Redcar steel works was being closed 8-9 years ago. We need such manufacturing jobs to afford to pay politicians generous salaries and pensions mate.Some time the proverbial has to hit the fan and we find  we can't even pay welfare,pensions and benefits because we produce nowt.

Am I right in saying CAP protects EU's farmers in a way the Chinese are protecting their steel industry?

I recall hearing some years aho how Africa farmers could not compete with EU farmers due to subsidies. Protectionism aint new.

It amazes me how little we produce here. Not just big ticket stuff but tiny things like plastic bags..

At the Olympics in 2012 I walked in one of the 2 mega stores. All the souvenirs that I saw were made in China. For our friggin Olympics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Much of it is driven by consumers who want cheap tat. How many of us would pay £10 for a t shirt for example when you can get one for £3 in Primark made in Indonesia?

Apparently it’s all just a myth put out by nasty right-wing columnists. Or so crows the Guardian, quoting EU-funded eco-propaganda site the Carbon Brief, claiming that the cost of green levies amounts to no more than one per cent of Port Talbot’s production costs. Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell agrees with this assessment. So that makes it all OK then, right?

Well, no. As we learn from Paul Homewood these “nothing to do with us, guv” claims are a downright lie.

In December last year the House of Commons Select Committee for Business, Innovation & Skills produced a report on the UK steel industry.

According to the industry, the price of electricity in the UK for extra large users is the highest in the EU by some margin. Figure 6 indicates that prices for these industrial consumers have risen steadily in the UK since the start of this century and were the highest in the EU in 2014.

Other studies have confirmed that electricity costs are relatively high in the UK for industrial users. Whilst energy costs may not represent a high proportion of total costs, we were told that they nonetheless represented a “significant proportion” and that “the margins are very small, so any disadvantage is magnified”.

Some of these relatively high costs can be attributed to policies designed to combat climate change. The Government estimates that climate change policies have added 18% to electricity prices for the steel industry, falling to 14% after compensatory measures are implemented.

According to the government’s own figures, climate policies are already adding 26 per cent to the cost of the electricity used by heavy industry. By 2020, the added cost caused by climate levies will rise to 59 per cent.

Tata, the Indian owner of the Port Talbot steel works, currently spends £250 million on energy for its European operations. So at UK rates, around £50 million of that cost consists of green levies. By 2020 this is set to rise to well over £100 million. In deciding to sell off its UK operations, then, Tata is thinking not just of the already inflated current energy costs but of the fact that the situation is going to get worse not better. Of course it’s going to move its steel production (“offshoring”) to wherever energy costs are cheaper: there would be no business sense in doing otherwise.

So yes, Chinese steel dumping may have played its part in the British steel industry’s demise. But so too, unquestionably, have all the environmental levies imposed by Labour’s Ed Miliband in his stint as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and subsequently endorsed by David Cameron in his bid to lead the “greenest government ever.”

And it’s not just steel that has been affected, as Matt Ridley notes:

Before Redcar and Port Talbot, remember Lynemouth, where Britain’s last large aluminium smelter closed in 2012. In aluminium, as in steel, China is now by far the largest producer, smelting five times as much as any other continent, let alone country. The chief reason aluminium left (though a small plant survives at Lochaber) was the sky-high electricity prices paid in Britain: electrolysis is how you make aluminium. For extra-large industrial users, British electricity prices are the highest in Europe, twice the average, and far higher than in Asia and America.

Ridley goes on to quote a particularly noisome piece of dishonesty from the loathsome Lord Deben, the green activist who chairs the government’s Committee on Climate Change and claims that Britain’s climate legislation is the “envy of the world.” Even more implausibly, Deben insists that there is “no evidence at all of offshoring due to climate policy” .

But as always with these stories, you can so easily get bogged down in the details that you lose sight of the big picture. For me, the two most important take-home messages from this ugly affair are as follows.

First, the green movement is ideologically opposed to Western industrial civilisation: so these factory closures are not a regrettable by-product but the very deliberate aim of its policies.

Second, just like the Social Justice Warriors, and just like the Islamists, the environmental movement has absolutely no problem with telling outright lies in the service of its cause. If you deliberately drive up energy prices by replacing cheap fossil fuels with expensive renewables costing three or more times than standard rate, then of course you are going to drive up the cost of living and of course you are going to penalise especially heavy industry users. Only someone with absolutely zero respect for the truth would have the gall even to pretend to argue otherwise.

Still, you can quite understand why at times like these the greens tone down their strident anti-capitalism. If ever the workers of the world got truly to appreciate just how much damage the environmentalists are doing to their livelihoods and job prospects, then the green movement would come to a very sudden and messy end.

tata want out as they think conservatives dont give sh!t about steel in uk, can hardly blame them

will the new owners get golden deals to take it on - I've seen a few examples of the government propping up companies with subsidies and then the new management disappear back to their native country with a chest full of cash.

To make matters worse, the UK doesn’t have a nationalised energy sector

strange mix of positions in that article