Portrait of the week: British Steel seized, army sent to Birmingham and slim told to stay home in Beijing

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Parliament was recalled from its Easter recess to sit on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982 to pass a bill to take control of British Steel, which amounts to no more than the works at Scunthorpe owned by the Chinese company Jingye since 2020. Scunthorpe, which employs 2,700 directly and thousands indirectly, is the last plant in Britain capable of making virgin steel. The bill, passing through the Commons and Lords, received the Royal Assent on the same day. The race against time was to supply the blast furnaces with coal before they were ruined by going cold; supplies from the United States were unloaded at Immingham docks, 25 miles away. The Secretary of State for Business, Jonathan Reynolds, received powers to give orders to the board and staff. He said in the Commons that Jingye would have ‘irrevocably and unilaterally closed down primary steelmaking’. Later, asked about finding a buyer for the works, he said: ‘I wouldn’t personally bring a Chinese company into our steel sector.’ A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Lin Jian, said that Britain should ‘avoid politicising trade cooperation or linking it to security issues’. Pressure for nationalisation was supported by the Greens and Reform.

GDP grew by 0.5 per cent in February, more than expected; a 0.1 per cent decline in January was also revised to zero. Army planners were lent to Birmingham, deep in tons of rubbish from the dustmen’s strike; striking members of the Unite union overwhelmingly rejected council peace terms. On one day 656 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats, bringing the year’s total to 8,064. Hashem Abedi, serving a 55-year sentence for his part in the Manchester Arena bombing, was named as the prisoner who allegedly sent three prison officers to hospital by attacking them with hot cooking oil and stabbing them.