No one wants American cars

The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a different kind of smokescreen – to hide the fact that British steelmaking has been doomed for decades and what just happened is a job-saving nationalisation that will be a massive drain on public funds for as long as it takes to admit that the last...