The plight of British steelmaking has reawakened Labour to the cause of the nation state

“This is in the national interest,” Sir Keir Starmer declared on his visit to Scunthorpe on Saturday to promote the plan to save the town’s two blast furnaces. Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, informed the Commons on the same day that the Government’s measures “are unequivocally in our national interest”.

Most Labour MPs who spoke in that debate used the words “the national interest”, as did most of those who tweeted about it. Chris McDonald (Labour, Stockton North), who has the merit of knowing a great amount about steel, said we are going to “take back control of our steel industry”.

Harry Phibbs warned yesterday on ConHome that what is happening is bad economics. But let us look for a moment at the politics.

One of the benefits of Brexit is that we have regained the right to make our own mistakes, and occasionally to learn from them. The buck stops at Westminster, not at Brussels.

What a transformation this has forced the Labour Party to make! It seems only yesterday that Starmer and his friends were desperate to find some way to take us back into the European Union. The answer to every difficult question was, they insisted, more Europe. This was an article of faith with them.

Now they proclaim, with impressive unanimity, the primacy of the national interest. Starmer is a lawyer who has taken a new brief, diametrically opposed to his previous one.

And he has every right to do this. It is how our system has long worked. In his brilliant essay on The Character of Sir Robert Peel, published in 1856, Walter Bagehot observed that public opinion “is a permeating influence” and “exacts obedience to itself”, which means that

“The most influential of constitutional statesmen is the one who most felicitously expresses the creed of the moment, who administers it, who embodies it in laws and institutions, who gives it the highest life it is capable of, who induces the average man to think, ‘I could not have done it any better if I had had time myself’.”

This is the politics of Starmer. He perceives that public opinion has changed, so he changes too, and makes with the greatest possible emphasis the case which his client, the British people, now wishes him to make.

He is remarkably agile, for lawyers need to be agile; he wants very much, within the rules of the game, to win, which is another characteristic of his profession; and he is fertile in finding the precedents which will help him to win the case on which he and his juniors are just now working.

The great source of precedents for nationalisation is the Labour Government of 1945. Pretty much everything it created contained either the word “National”, as in “National Health Service”, or the word “British”, as in “British Railways”.

There could be no doubt of that government’s patriotism. Its leading members had served loyally in the wartime coalition at the side of Winston Churchill, and Clement Attlee had once, as everyone knew, been Major Attlee, severely wounded during the First World War.

Ernest Bevin, the mighty Foreign Secretary, supported the creation of an independent British nuclear deterrent: “We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.”

Realising at once that Stalin must be defied, he also took the lead both in creating NATO and in setting up the free press and free trade unions in the British sector of what became West Germany, so that the greater part of Germany became firmly anchored in the West and helped to keep the Russians out.

Bevin refused too to join the fledgling European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union, and regarded Churchill’s pro-European statements as an attempt to make political capital, not as a guide to what Churchill would actually do. So it proved.

Starmer, with his preference for coalitions of the willing, has placed himself in the Bevin tradition, and to the obvious retort that Starmer is no Bevin, one must ask whether anyone else is either.

Stephen Flynn, leader at Westminster of the Scots Nats, complained during Saturday’s debate:

“Why is this not being extended to Scotland? Why is Grangemouth not being included, why is the smelter up at Lochaber not being included and why are the Dalzell steelworks not being included? The answer to why they are not being included is that Westminster is only interested in Westminster; it is not interested in Scotland.”

How wonderful to find Flynn, one of the best debaters in the House of Commons, calling on Starmer to save Scotland by being a proper Unionist. Here too one sees the logic of Brexit at work. Only the British Government can create the conditions for Grangemouth, and the smelter up at Lochaber, to thrive.

The saddest face on the Government front bench on Saturday belonged to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. He looked like a man in mourning for his own career as the doomed prophet of universal remedies which have done no good to Grangemouth, or to the smelter up at Lochaber.

Meanwhile Richard Tice, for Reform, complained that Starmer has stolen Reform’s policy:

“My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) and I have been calling for British Steel to be a strategic national corporation for some six years.”

Politics often requires the appropriation of one’s opponents’ policies, and Starmer performs such thefts with an air of virtue which infuriates his rivals.

He wishes to persuade voters that he, not Farage or Kemi Badenoch, is the true defender of the national interest. It is possible that within a few years the Labour Government will have failed in so many different ways that this claim becomes unsustainable. But one can meanwhile derive some encouragement from Starmer’s belated discovery that he, too, is a Unionist.