THE boss of SSI reckons that steelmaking on Teesside can be revived.

On another day, a story that held out hope to thousands of workers and their families would have been splashed across our front page. We believe it would be wrong, however, to give people false hope.

Win Viriyaprapaikit, president and chief executive of SSI is based in Bangkok but he must be a regular visitor to cloud cuckoo land if he thinks that Redcar steel plant can be brought back to life. Mr Win, as he is known on Teesside, claims that waiting until the steel crisis blows over – goodness only knows how long that might take – and steel prices start to rise could give SSI’s UK site the chance to restart production.

He may be kidding himself and trying to buy time with his financial backers but people in the North-East have been let down too many times to fall for this kind of claptrap.

The Redcar coke ovens long since fell into disrepair, vital assets have been driven off to the scrapyard and it would cost a small fortune to make the blast furnace operational.

Mr Win’s other option, he says, is to find a buyer. Desperate attempts to sell the Port Talbot works, and Tata’s recent decision to offload all of its UK steel plants, shows that potential buyers for loss-making steel operations are rather thin on the ground.

Things could have been so different. Had the Government offered Redcar the kind of support it is now giving Port Talbot, then the works could have been mothballed and potentially brought back to life at a later date. That hope was extinguished last October.

Efforts need to focus on cleaning up the site so that new jobs can be brought to the area.

All Mr Win's bizarre plan will do is hamper