“It’s Saturday,” said Lindsay Hoyle, “That doesn’t mean it’s Crackerjack Day.” He was trying to calm a frankly excited emergency sitting of the House of Commons. For the sixth time since the Second World War, MPs had been summoned to the chamber on a Saturday. Previous moments of drama included the death of the Queen, the invasion of the Falklands, and, inevitably, Brexit. Familiarity is somewhat diminishing the novelty: there have been as many Saturday sittings in the past six years as in the previous 70.
We were there, summoned from our ploughs and our lawnmowers, to seize control of the means of production. Steel production, anyway. In the end it took three hours of debate and less than four minutes of voting for the Commons to agree. No one voted against as the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill whizzed through all its parliamentary stages.
There were those who had warned, or hoped, that this was what a Labour government would look like: confiscating private industries in seconds, without objections. But the nature of modern politics mean that ministers were extremely nervous about this triumph of socialism, whilst MPs on the right were urging them to go further. It’s appropriate that, though Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds has chosen to sport a beard that evokes a great Russian of history, his model seems to be not Lenin, but Tsar Nicholas II.
Perhaps the paperback of Boris Johnson’s memoirs will have an extra chapter explaining the due diligence he did
Opening the debate, Reynolds made it clear that he had no interest in any great leaps forward. Indeed, one of the reasons parliament was in an emergency sitting, rather than having sorted the legislation out earlier in the week, was his intense reluctance.
The turnout was profoundly unbalanced, with the government benches full to overflowing and wide gaps everywhere else. And despite the Speaker’s best efforts, there was something of a bank holiday atmosphere amongst Labour MPs. “This is very serious,” he told them, again, as they jeered at the Conservatives.
“We meet under exceptional circumstances to take exceptional action in what are exceptional times,” Reynolds began. He looked like he’d barely slept. The main villains in his speech were the Chinese owners of British Steel, Jingye. They had, he said, strung the government along whilst working to run the company’s Scunthorpe plant down. Conservative backbencher David Davis agreed, and added that the plant should be seized with just a penny of compensation. Steady on comrade, Reynolds didn’t quite reply.
Moments later Reform’s Richard Tice leaped up to make the same point. “Surely the right thing to do is seize this great opportunity,” he cried, “and nationalise British Steel!” It was a great example of why politicians find it so difficult to score hits on Nigel Farage’s party: its politics are all over the place, to the right of the Conservatives one moment and to the left of Labour another. Would Tice have supported nationalising an industry last year? It’s doubtful. Will he support it next year? Who knows? But in this moment, that’s where the votes are in that place. It’s the essence of populism.
Speaking of which, there was surprisingly little discussion of how Jingye came to be in a position to shut down an industry that turns out to be vital to our national security. Would you like to guess which prime minister signed that one off? Perhaps the paperback of Boris Johnson’s memoirs will have an extra chapter explaining the due diligence he did, but don’t count on it.
Reynolds turned to the current Conservative leader, who also happens to have been his predecessor as Business Secretary. It was, he said, “a matter of genuine regret” that he was going to have to correct her claim of Friday that she had negotiated a deal to save British Steel. “The new government inherited no such deal,” he said. “We could not renege on that deal because it did not exist.”
Opposite him, Kemi Badenoch was bouncing out of her seat in fury. She demanded a point of order. “Factually incorrect!” she cried. “Factually incorrect and a complete misrepresentation of the situation that he inherited!”
What’s that you say? You’re wondering if she had walked into a very obvious trap? Reynolds invited her to speak again. Could she explain more? “We were negotiating a modernisation deal that would have had limited job losses,” Badenoch began. Sorry, “negotiating”, or “negotiated”?
Reynolds invited her to stand a third time and explain how much the deal she had previously claimed to have done would have cost. “We had not finished the negotiation so there was no amount,” she yelled, over ironic cheers from Labour. “But it would have succeeded better than the terrible plan that he’s got now.” It’s an approach that will be familiar to fans of Pride And Prejudice: there are few people who are better natural negotiators than Badenoch, and had she ever completed a negotiation, it would have been a triumph.
