Britain's special relationship with China is becoming more expensive by the day. It now threatens to destroy the British steel industry, a foundation pillar of our manufacturing economy.
Britain is not alone. Most of Europe's steel foundries are heading for annihilation under the current EU trade regime, with unthinkable consequences through the network of European and British supply chains.
It is hard to pin down the exact moment when George Osborne's love affair with China turned into a Faustian Pact.
What we know is that the British government has for the last three years been blocking efforts by the EU to equip itself with the sort of anti-dumping weaponry used by Washington to confront China.
The EU trade directorate has been rendered toothless by a British veto. So much for the canard that the UK has no influence in Brussels.
"The British are sacrificing an entire European industry to say thank you to China for signing up to the nuclear power project at Hinkley Point, and pretending it is about free trade," said one official in Brussels bitterly.
What they are blocking is a change to an EU regulation intended to beef up Europe's 'trade defence instruments' (TDI), enabling it to respond much more quickly to Chinese dumping and too impose much tougher penalties.
The British have cobbled together a blocking minority in the council, much to the annoyance of the French, Italians, Spanish, and Germans.
The UK view is that the Commission mixed up good changes with bad changes, and that punitive tariffs merely hurt your own consumers, so you shoot yourself in the foot.
Yet the outcome is that it still takes Brussels 16 months to crank up full sanctions, twice as long as it takes the US. It is why the EU limits itself to a 'Lesser Duty' regime that often fails to reflects the full injury.
While Washington has slapped penalties of 267pc on Chinese cold-rolled steel, the EU peashooter has so far managed just 13pc.
Redcar has already paid the price for this ultra-free trade ideology, and Port Talbot is about to follow. There will eventually be little left if the current drift in trade policy is allowed to continue.
China's share of global steel output has risen from 10pc to 50pc over the last decade. It has installed capacity of 1.2bn tonnes a year that it can never hope to absorb as the construction boom deflates.
Source: Telegraph