In recent weeks, Keir Starmer has been working hard to butter up the new schoolyard bully in Washington. One of his key aims was to exempt Britain from US tariffs in the unfolding global trade war.
His grovelling attempts at slick diplomacy were clear to all. Trump himself remarked of Starmer’s trip to the White House: “He was working hard, I’ll tell you that.”
However, despite this ‘hard-working’ palm greasing – with all its wooing flattery, presentation of royal invitations, and appeals to Trump’s alleged Anglophilia – the President of the United States will not budge.
Hammer blows
British steel is to be the principal target of US tariffs.
This, in turn, will mean a hard knock to British exports. In total, UK steel exports to the US amount to around £700 million. However, the figure rises to £2.2 billion (5 percent of UK exports to the US) when considering all products containing steel and aluminium.
The bosses, unhappy with tariffs eating into their profits, will in turn offload this cost onto their workers, with mass sackings and closure of factories down the line.
Already, the bosses at the British Steel plant in Lincolnshire are planning to close down two of their blast furnaces, putting close to 3,000 jobs at risk, and threatening to turn Scunthorpe into a “disaster town”.
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(We will publish a separate article dealing with the Scunthorpe steelworks on communist.red this week.)
With or without tariffs, however, the UK steel industry is already in a state of terminal decline.
The ink has barely dried on the 3,000 redundancy letters to steelworkers in Port Talbot, South Wales.
Ignoring all the hand-wringing of the Labour and trade union leaders, Tata bosses decided to close up and set up shop abroad, where labour costs are lower and profits higher.
In truth, Starmer and co. did not lift a finger to save these steel jobs. And we cannot expect him and his big business government to do any better now.
So far, the Prime Minister has only responded to Trump’s protectionism by saying that “all options are on the table”.
Included among these “options”, in negotiations to prevent American tariffs, is the concession of a tax break on US tech giants. This at a time when Labour is imposing austerity on the most vulnerable to ‘balance the books’!
Starmer’s opponents in Parliament have hypocritically criticised him for giving in to Trump’s ‘bullying’. Yet they would act no differently in power – implementing cuts and kowtowing to their master on the other side of the Atlantic.
What the current US-UK tariffs kerfuffle is actually exposing, and accelerating, is the secular weakness of the British economy, and the long-term demise of the country’s industry.
For decades, the parasitic British capitalist class withheld investments into productive industry and infrastructure, favouring the opportunity to make a quick buck through financial services and speculation.
This has hamstrung the UK economy, leading British capitalism to fall further and further behind its global competitors. Brexit, meanwhile, only exacerbated this frailty and fragility.
It is this weakness that compels Starmer to find a deal with Trump at all costs. British capitalism cannot afford to be further cut adrift from its main markets.
If the PM fails to get the deal he wants, however, we can expect no better from protectionist measures. Any form of subsidies to save factories and jobs will be pocketed by the parasitic monopolies that run the show, as was aptly demonstrated by the example of Tata and Port Talbot.
The UK steel industry will continue to flounder, meanwhile, as a global steel glut and saturated markets force the bosses to drive down wages and conditions in order to protect their profits – until finally the capitalists pack up shop and go somewhere else.
No trust in Starmer!
What do the trade union leaders have to say?
In the last year – since Tata Steel announced the closure of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot – the ‘tea and biscuits brigade’ dragged their feet and routinely followed procedures.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham’s programme of defence was summarised in a speech she gave to a steelworkers’ rally in early 2024.
On one hand, Graham correctly said that workers could only rely on their own strength and fight. On the other hand, however, she sowed illusions in Starmer’s promises of steel subsidies – rather than calling for workers to occupy the plant and demand the expropriation of Tata Steel, under their own control.
In short, the Unite leader was saying: “We will fight for you! How? By placing all our hopes in Starmer’s Labour!”
What was the result? Sir Keir Starmer was elected, and did nothing to prevent the jobs massacre, which promptly went ahead according to Tata’s schedule.
At present, the crisis facing UK steel is even more severe. In Port Talbot, there’s no reason to believe that the output of the new ‘greener’ electric arc furnace (producing recycled steel) will be exempt from the tariffs. Prospects for retaining the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe are similarly dire.
Having been met with aloof indifference by Starmer’s government in response to their pleas, Graham recently stated that “Donald Trump’s steel tariff threat should be a wake-up call for this government”.
In other words, the union leaders are offering more of the same: more appeals to Starmer and Labour, with tepid calls for further subsidies and public sector procurement regulations to prioritise British steel.
🚨 Our @GOVUK must act decisively to protect the steel industry and its workers following the announcement of US tariffs.
📢 This is a matter of national security. Steel should be immediately designated as critical national infrastructure to properly protect it. #Trump 1/2 ⤵️
— Sharon Graham (@UniteSharon) March 12, 2025
What’s needed, however, are bold socialist measures, backed up by militant action.
Communist solution
The Communists say: the only way to actually save steel jobs is through militant class struggle.
This means no trust in Starmer and his Labour government. They have time and time again shown, in practice, that they are not on the side of the working class, but are in the pocket of big business.
Similarly, no amount of flag-waving about the importance of ‘British’ steel will do anything to convince the bosses, who care only about their bottom line.
On the contrary: the nationalism of the trade union leaders only serves to sow illusions in the bosses. Workers must entirely reject any idea of ‘national unity’ with British bosses.
The capitalists may wrap themselves in the Union Jack when it serves their interests, to gain some extra pocket money from the government. But they will happily change their colours – and throw workers on the scrapheap – when the opportunity presents itself for greater profits elsewhere.
To fight back, the working class can only trust its own strength, as an international class.
Tariffs will have devastating effects on many other sectors of the economy, both in Britain and internationally. This will provide many opportunities for affected workers to link up with their class brothers and sisters in other industries and countries.
Neither free trade nor protectionism are a solution. ‘Globalisation’ has meant a race to the bottom for workers across the world. Retaliatory tariffs, meanwhile, will only further fragment the whole economy, pushing up inflation and eroding workers’ living standards and livelihoods.
We cannot rely on ‘our own’ capitalist class and its representatives to save us. Instead, we say that workers must occupy any factory threatened with closure, and run it under their own control, in order to both save and really modernise these industries.
Steel and other threatened industries must be nationalised – without compensation. We must not hand over a penny to the parasites who have sucked every drop of blood out of Britain’s industries, and who are always ready to swim off elsewhere in search of more nutritious victims.
Ultimately, the only way to resolve the deep problems facing British industry, including the steel sector, is through socialist planning, internationalism, and class unity.
These issues aren’t only affecting workers in Britain, but the working class globally. Workers must link up across borders, and fight back on an internationalist class basis.
The trade war is not our war, but a battle between rival capitalist gangsters.
The only way forward is through an international class war, to overthrow all the capitalists, and join hands in a worldwide socialist plan of production.
Workers of the world – unite!
