Steel yourself

The government’s decision to recall parliament and take effective control over the Scunthorpe steel works raises several issues.

For a start if they can do this to what is left of the steel industry, why not nationalise Thames water, or take back control of the MODs housing stock, a disastrous privatisation that costs billions?

Why not admit that while no one really cares if BA is a private company or BP for that matter, we should and must care who owns our national grid, our vital utilities and the huge monopolies that were privatised with out any real competition built into the system.

But the wider point is that there are quite a few people, including Tump, who think that no country is truly sovereign if it doesn’t make its own steel. Now like many other people they don’t understand what sovereignty means, they actually are interested in military and economic independence, not being reliant on others for vital materials, having the ability to build your own weapons from scratch and so forth.

But do they have a point?

After all the UK has no shortage of allies from whom it could buy unlimited amounts of steel or any and all types. In Europe alone there are still significant steel plants in many countries, then there is the rest of the world. It is not like we would become totally dependent on the Chinese Communist party’s grace and favour.

But then we see what happens if you let a Chinese company take over your last steel plant. When Trump is starting a trade war and taxing steel to breaking point; they apparently won’t even take free government money while they talk about the future.

Surely it is that which has set off the alarm bells?

We have allowed many vital industries to move abroad, be bought and run by foreigners and we have been told for the last 45 years that this does not matter, that it is more efficient and a sign of confidence by others, in our country.

Except when they decide to shut down a vital industry, and refuse to even discuss its future seriously.

Then all of a sudden we realise that perhaps selling off the family silver does matter, ownership is important, national interest does demand that we control at least some aspects of our own economy.

So this could be a real turning point. Not that mass nationalisation is back, but where the free market is failing it is sometimes necessary to run things for the national benefit and with Trump in the White House that is likely to be concentrating minds in lots of countries.

We cannot trust Trump and we would be mad to trust China, we did have the unfaltering trust of the EU but then we left in a hissy fit.

Scunthorpe shows how weak we really are, how we have allowed foreign interests milk our essential companies and have just wittered on about the free market.

Well the free market just got a lot less free, but at least we have a government willing to act, the Tories would have just shed crocodile tears.

As they have done since 1979.

Jonty’s Jottings

From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.