London:
The UK business secretary on Sunday had “Bhola” to allow its sensitive steel industry to fall into the hands of a Chinese company after the control of British steel.
But Jonathan Reynolds said that he did not doubt the Chinese state to try to tank the plant in northern England, capable of making steel from the country’s last factory scratch.
The government on Saturday launched an immediate law through Parliament, so that to prevent the closure of the explosion furnaces of the Scanthorpe plant, its Chinese owners Jinge said they were not financially viable to burn them.
Jingye bought British Steel in 2020 and said it invested more than 1.2 billion GBP ($ 1.5 billion) to maintain operations, but was losing about 700,000 pounds in a day.
“As a country, we have misunderstood it in the past,” Business and Trade Secretary Reynolds told Sky News on Sunday, convicted previous orthodox leaders for allowing Chinese companies to run sensitive infrastructure. “It was very innocent about something about it,” he said.
He argued that a balance was needed. Some fields “were more sensitive than others,” he said, “The UK-Chinese trade is much in non-contact areas.”
Discussing the troubles with the Scanthorpe plant, he said: “I am not accusing the Chinese state of being directly behind it.
“I really feel that they would understand that we could not accept the proposal that was kept with us in terms of losing the necessary national capacity. So I am not accusing any kind of foreign influence.”
He later told the BBC that Jinge had rejected a proposal for a support of about 500 million pounds, instead requested an amount of more than twice that the furnaces would be open with some guarantee.
Reynolds also refused to guarantee the government, which came to power last year, before the supply, could get enough raw materials to keep two furnaces.
The Prime Minister Kir Stmper recalled Parliament for a rare Saturday session to push through the law, warning that the plant was facing adjacent shutdowns with thousands of jobs at risk.
The government saw its potential shutdown as a threat to Britain’s long -term economic security, seeing the decline of Britain’s strong steel industry once.
But the labor government set fire to fire to deal with talks with the opposition orthodoxy party and faced calls from unions and some politicians, which to fully nationalize the plant – which Renolds said was beyond the purview of Saturday’s law, but a “next step” could be.
The leader of the Hard-Right Reform UK Party Nigel Faraj also said that he supported the nationalization of the plant.
On Sunday, he accused the British Steel of deliberately trying to close the British Steel, without providing evidence for the allegation on the Chinese Communist Party.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)