Nationalisation is a red herring. But the state should save steel | Martin Kettle

With Port Talbot under threat, we can no longer treat industrial policy as a relic of the 20th century

In January 2015 Sajid Javid, then culture secretary and now business secretary, was invited to choose and introduce a film for members of parliament’s new crossbench film society to watch. Javid’s choice caught the audience by surprise. No Star Wars, no Godfather, no Brief Encounter for him. Instead Javid picked the 1949 movie The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper as the defiant architect Howard Roark. Why? The important clue, Javid explained, was the script, which had been adapted by the implacable libertarian Ayn Rand from her novel of the same name.

Javid admitted that The Fountainhead was not his favourite movie, but he said that it was the most important to him. When he first saw it, he said that evening, he thought it was “a film that was articulating what I felt”. So taken with its message was he that Javid even, he remembered, read the movie’s courtroom scene aloud to his future wife, Laura, when they were courting – a scene I find difficult to banish from my view of Javid. And still today, he went on, he made sure to read that same scene to himself twice a year.

Permanent nationalisation wouldn’t work and it won’t happen

Related: Nationalisation not the answer to steel crisis, says David Cameron

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