Steely stuff

UK Steel is screwed. That is the long and the short of it. Like coal before it and shipbuilding, the heavy industry we once had is going the way of the dinosaur. “But what will the workers do?” comes the cry “The government must step in and save the industry!” Their hearts may be in the right place, but who pays for it?

Somebody trying to persuade for Remain was saying the other day that "45% of UK exports go to EU but only around 7% of their exports come to the UK". Maybe so, but that is spread across 27 other countries. It would be physically impossible to trade equally with a population 8 times our size. For instance, if we exported 50% of our production to 5 other countries and they each exported 10% of theirs to us we’d have an overall trade balance yet a massive trade surplus with each of them if we mix and match our ‘facts’ to make our argument, the way socialists do.

Socialism is complicated; take housing... (See how I am changing the subject so as to appear knowledgeable while still nevertheless changing the subject – it’s the dialectic, or something.) I want to buy a house, except I can’t afford a house. But if I demand that the state just gives me one it is only going to upset the bloke next door who has scrimped and saved to buy his. So the state will build me a house (probably a bit bigger and better than the one next door because, you know, standards) charge me a subsidised rent, then pay me that rent back in housing benefit. They’ll have to cover the council tax as well and pay my national insurance, so I get a full pension and obviously cover my general running costs because I’m boracic and I certainly can’t afford it.

The bloke next door is looking at me in a funny way now. He’s envious because he thinks I have more than he has. That’s silly; we have the same, but I don’t pay for what I’ve got as I don’t have a job. That’s not my fault because I don’t have any qualifications, which is because I could never really be arsed at school. Anyway, unlike me, he doesn’t have time to get really annoyed because he is greedy and has a second job to go to. Me, I have plenty of time, which I spend on Twitter, complaining about the government and the fact that those bastards want me to suffer austerity so they can keep the NHS going or something.

So the state taxes low earners to subsidise no earners. And it taxes companies so they need to keep their costs down, so they import cheap workers from poorer countries – who want to come here because the wages my neighbour can’t live on are still much better than theirs. Then they get to live here, pay virtually no tax – even though the government pretends that they do - while receiving tax credits and housing benefit and child benefit and so on – and send money home so that in a few years they can buy a house of their own in their own country; unlike me, here at home.

My neighbour can't afford to retire in England as he has a mortgage to repay, but he's thinking of moving to one of the poor countries made even poorer by the migration of all their workers, where he can buy a cheap house and live off his savings and his UK state pension. People like him take money out of the UK but spend frugally so don’t really do much for those poor countries they move to except to encourage more Brits to move abroad and buy cheap houses, so pushing up the prices which means the workers in those countries still have to migrate to Britain to earn enough to buy a house...  

Anyway, in the socialist utopia all this is normal.  The state should make everybody happy. The way to do this is to spend money. We haven’t got any money and you would think we can’t spend money we don’t have, but you’re not thinking, my friend. We can either earn money – oh no, evil capitalism – or we can do it the kinder way. To build our dream home we just have to borrow money we will never be able to repay but that’s fine because the state can just print more to make what we borrowed worth less, so that eventually repaying it becomes pointless anyway. Other countries have to do the same because we‘re not paying them back, so they have to borrow more and so on. In the end, everybody owes everybody else so much that I think we just write off the debts and shake hands.

Could it be overmanning?

As a socialist I’m a bit hazy on the finer details, but I trust a future Labour government to sort it out and say no to brutal ‘Tory Cuts’. Save the steel and solve the problem, I say. Then do the same with energy, housing, transport, trade, jobs, education, health, defence... On balance, though, maybe not today, maybe not next year but sooner or later UK steel is still screwed.

Dumping Ground

Oh dear, the Chinese have been dumping cheap steel on the market. But why not, it’s their steel? And if there is a market for it isn’t that how trade is supposed to work; supply-demand and all that? When it comes to competition it appears the little yella-fellas are winning; I suppose it is all Margaret Thatcher’s fault. It usually is. Labour is attacking the Conservatives for allowing this to happen and for honouring the Chinese president with a state visit, but the close-downs at Redcar and the layoffs by Tata in Scunthorpe are almost certainly just bad timing... unless they held off until now to make a point. Certainly the state visit wasn’t just cobbled together in a few weeks.

Coal, cars, ship-building... all but gone. But didn’t Labour preside over much of this anyway and wasn’t Blair’s government all about putting the heavy horses out to grass and letting the money men in? It’s all very well mounting protests at the loss of manual jobs and the ‘destruction of communities’ but what did Labour ever do to rebuild those communities, other than put them all on welfare forever? And what was Labour’s contribution to the wholesale ‘cultural’ assault on communities such as Rotherham and elsewhere, where concerns over massive expansions in segregated immigrant communities were dismissed as racist?

What are the rules here? Loss of a thousand jobs in Labour heartlands bad, bad and all the fault of the Tories, but importation of hundreds of thousands of unskilled labour to do all the work in Labour heartlands good, good and feel the diversity? Overwhelming public services by unprecedented and unchecked immigration is good news, but making a few hundred steelworkers unemployed is apocalyptically bad? There has to be some committee making these position decisions, surely? What happened to the coopering industry? Were there riots on the demise of the steel-rimmed wagon wheel trade? Who gave a fig for the gas-lighters or turned out to march for lead and tin? Or were those industries not emotive enough, not sufficiently photogenic enough to arouse a guttural whine from Labour’s collective soul?

And while weeping for the steel, Labour is simultaneously denouncing the establishment’s nurturing of potential inward investment worth £billions and many thousands more jobs, which will typically go to yet more wonderful immigrants because Labour wants its own people to wallow in their hurt to make a point. Mounting its high moral horse, the party of perpetual opposition will cheer on the moochers and wreckers and reject out of principle deals that could dwarf the losses.

Steel[workers] recycling plant...

You can’t have it both ways, Labour; you don’t get to have a moribund system of state control with subsidy of failed industry and progress at the same time. When job losses loom you need your work force to be educated and adaptable to be able to retrain and take up new roles and while you may mourn, for a day, the demise of the old you have to embrace the new. Oh but, ‘education, education, education’ was only ever a slogan and just as with any surpluses to requirements the newly unskilled steel workers will be piled high and sold cheap in the market of cheap labour created by the EU. It’s not just the Chinese who are ‘Dumping down’.