By Sam Knight
On May 22nd, British Steel, which is the United Kingdom’s second-largest steelmaker, went into liquidation. It hasn’t been easy to manufacture steel in the U.K. for a number of years. The country’s high energy costs and property taxes make it an inhospitable place for heavy industry, even compared with other European countries. But it wasBrexit—specifically, the unresolved, purgatorial, shapeless Brexit that Britain finds itself in, three years after deciding to leave the European Union—that carried British Steel over the edge. Last year, with uncertainty stalking the economy, orders began to dry up. In April, because the Brexit negotiations were not complete, the company was hit with a hundred-and-twenty-million-poundprobably Boris Johnson, has not yet arrived. Desperate to avoid a spectacular bankruptcy in the interlude, the state has been paying British Steel’s bills and the salaries of its workers, while looking for a buyer to take four blast furnaces, named after English queens, and a two-thousand-acre steelworks off its hands.
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