Clean energy superpower – and now defence superpower. Can the UK really be both?

Plans to close the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe raises questions about how the UK will get the steel it needs for defensive production. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The UK will become a “defence industrial superpower”, said the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in Wednesday’s spring statement, an ambition that will involve using much more steel, one assumes.

Now comes news that the Chinese owner of the UK’s second largest steel plant may close its two blast furnaces as early as June, which would further erode the UK’s already-thin steel-making capabilities. Indeed, closure of Scunthorpe would also mean an end to domestic steel-making from scratch using traditional carbon-intensive blast furnaces – the other two, at Tata’s Port Talbot site, closed last year.