Is British Steel British if it's owned by the Chinese?

Keir Starmer reckons that he want to use more British steel in the production of British warships, but he somehow forgot to mention that British Steel is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate.

Keir Starmer has been rambling on about how he would use more British steel to build British warships, citing a trip to the British Steel plant at Scunthorpe during his fact-averse and jingoistic tirade.

What Starmer entirely failed to mention is that what’s left of British Steel is now entirely owned by a Chinese Township and Village Enterprise (TVE) called Jingye.

Starmer must know this having visited their headquarters in Scunthorpe, unless he’s so lacking in forensic analysis skills that he’s somehow failed to notice that what’s left of British Steel has been a plaything of overseas investors since 1999.

There’s actually very little information on who actually owns Jingye besides puff pieces for their chairman Li Ganpo, but it seems likely that like most TVEs, it’s at least partly owned by the Chinese state, especially given all of the bumf about their revolutionary credentials on their website.

Isn’t it odd how Keir Starmer has viciously purged thousands of mild-mannered democratic socialists out of the Labour Party for being too left-wing, but he’s absolutely chilled about British Steel being owned by a company that boasts on their website about how they "conscientiously implement the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and Xi Jinping’s thought of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era"? (funnily enough they don’t mention any of this stuff on the British Steel website).

It’s pretty astonishing that the UK steel industry could have been taken over by a Chinese company over three years ago, and nobody in the UK seems to have made any real effort to investigate who the owners are, beyond writing puff pieces for their frontman Li Ganpo.

But this complete lack of scrutiny over the fate of our once-mighty steel industry is indicative of the absolutely appalling state of journalism in the UK.

Most capitalist media hacks in the UK are lazy as hell and infested with a debilitating form of groupthink. Thus they’ll idly rehash any old bollocks they’re told by establishment politicians without asking any questions of their own, and viciously attack anyone who questions their lazy pro-establishment groupthink.

Furthermore they’ll insist that the British left are a bunch of ideologically deranged lunatics for arguing that core services and industries (energy, water, health, public transport, mail, what’s left of British Steel …) should be taken back under public ownership and run for the good of the British people and the British economy, while displaying absolutely no curiosity about how Chinese communist tycoons and overseas governments have got their hands on vast swathes of the former national industries they insist shouldn’t be publicly owned.

If UK media hacks had any curiosity, or any desire at all to hold the powerful to account, here are some of the questions they could have asked Keir Starmer instead of uncritically regurgitating his drivel.

• Who are the actual owners of the Jingye group that now operate British Steel?

• What proportion of the Jingye company is owned by the Chinese government and/or Chinese local authorities?

• Does Keir Starmer’s new slogan "British Steel for British warships" ring true when the owners of British Steel are Chinese?

• What does Keir Starmer actually intend to do to pressurise Jingye into producing the "clean steel" he says he wants them to produce?

• Why does Keir Starmer apparently believe that it’s right for foreign governments like China, France, Qatar, Singapore, Italy, UAE, Oman, Germany, Malaysia, Australia … to buy up stakes in core UK services and industries, while opposing British public ownership of the same things?

• Why are the accounts for British Steel Limited and Jingye Steel (UK) Holding almost a year overdue with HMRC?

• Does Keir Starmer intend to provide the hundreds of £millions in subsidies that the Jingye group is seeking?

• If it’s going to cost the UK hundreds of £millions in subsidies to keep British Steel going, why not just renationalise it?

But instead of asking any of these pertinent questions, UK media hacks just uncritically parroted Starmer’s talking points, demonstrating that they’ve got absolutely no intention of holding him to account, and no real interest in the UK steel industry besides helping Starmer to use it for propaganda purposes.