This is arguably an existential moment for the United Kingdom as a manufacturer. The closure of Port Talbot’s blast furnace would mean we no longer make steel as opposed to processing and recycling steel. If we allow this to happen we will lose the modern, high productivity infrastructure and skills we have there and offer steel imports a big opening to the UK market.
This definitely needs strong government intervention, no question, and we need a cooperative strategy with our partners across Europe. The crisis at Tata is acute, but Europe’s whole steel sector is struggling.
The governments in London and Cardiff must continue their search for a new private sector investor in Port Talbot and use their convening power to encourage restructuring or cancelling of debt. That will enable potential new investors to assess the true value of the technology, skills and capital investment which in any sensible valuation are far from ‘worthless’. Tata UK needs to recognise its responsibilities to its pensioners and its sites and should cooperate fully with the UK government in the search for solutions. In principle, I would not rule out temporary government ownership of the Port Talbot plant as a step towards finding new long-term owners.
Before we fall into the trap of saying that the European Union is a problem here, we should recognise that over-capacity globally is a big part of the problem and the EU is best placed to take a strong collective stand on demanding the introduction of faster Chinese reforms and effective defence against dumping in the meantime.
EU state aid rules can support a serious plan to restructure around new specialised technology and long-term viability. The European Commission should be urged to use the ‘critical infrastructure’ public interest case for steel and establish collective rules to provide state aid for restructuring plans, bridging finance and future investment.
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Peter Mandelson is former European commissioner for trade and secretary of state for business
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Whilst this is a necessary strategy it is reactive. So much of the traditional Labour strategy is constructed around state intervention being employed for ‘market failures’. There is nothing that has arisen by this crisis that was not well known by those engaged in it for over a year. Using state interventions to reactively address each market failure that arises is not going to generate the productive growth that the UK economy needs. If anything what this crisis demonstrates is the traditional Labour weakness in having no ‘long term plan’ at all. We need a National Investment Bank that strategically addresses the long economic needs that private capital will not address as long as their quick and cheap money gains to be derived from investing in dormant property with its gambling on inflated prices, or the purchase of derivative products that do nothing more than further purchases of derivative products. Incidentally, in my opinion franchising our decision – making and the political presses to that of the European Union will promote the UK economic needs.
RBS could be that National Investment Bank.. Must not sell it off. Strategic assets must be kept. Lack of work means more sickness and pressure on NHS. Loss of steel means loss of skills. Without an industrial base, the UK will return to the pre-industrial nation of shopkeers.
Sergei Roldugin should offer to buy British Steel. As should Donald Trump. Things would move pretty damn quickly if that happened.
It’s a hilarious day for us Corbynistas when a Blairite like Stephen Kinnock is outflanked on the left by Peter Hitchens.
Whilst it might seem difficult to avoid the individualism that comes with a ‘cult of the Kinnocks’ in Wales, most Corbyn supporters think it is more valuable and politically significant to give emphasis to the programmatic than to the personal. It is important to argue and show rather than just state, how the traditional Labour approaches, do not give us advantages over ‘coalition government type’ solutions to market failure. In this way those who chose to live in a ‘Blair – style’ past may come to see that it offers working people few fundamental alternatives to a liberal – conservativism, with human sentiment, good intentions and EU alleviation from the worst features of unemployment.
Nationalise steel and electricity.
That Peter Hitchens column is not news to some of us: http://primepolitics.org/2015/07/23/the-peter-hitchens-of-the-left/. It is a searing indictment of the Conservative Party, effectively as such and forever, since, like UKIP, that party has no concept of itself as defined or definable in any terms other than those which Hitchens denounces.
That is just what the British Right is. 1979 is its Year Zero, the 1980s its unquestionable Golden Age, Margaret Thatcher its deity. Hitchens is effectively calling for the Right to cease to exist in Britain, such is the damage that it has done. And it has been doing that damage continuously since 1979.
The devastating critique of Thatcherism is at least as significantly a devastating critique of the New Labour project that Jeremy Corbyn’s embittered enemies are seeking to prolong or revive. However few votes, within the electorate at large, Corbyn secured in order to become the Leader of the Labour Party, he managed one and a half times as many as the other three candidates put together.
How well does anyone seriously imagine that Labour would now be doing, under any of those three? It would have had no response to the contrived collapse of the British steel industry, since the fundamental principle of New Labour was a total acceptance of Thatcherism, not even constrained by atavistic Toryism, as inevitable and even beneficial.
Nor would it have been able to oppose the Government’s proposed theft of vast capital assets from the public by means of the forced academisation of schools. Hating local government and the trade unions, that was what Tony Blair always wanted to do: turn all schools into academies, by force.
The roots of all of this were in New Labour’s origins in Gramsci (for all that he would never have intended it to turn out like this), in post-Fordism, in the Marxism Today for which Blair wrote, and so on. Of course, none of those had the first thing to do with the British Labour Movement.
Post-Fordism was remarkable in that it brought into existence that which it had described, quite inaccurately, as already existent. By cutting the intellectual ground from under those who might have defended post-War British social democracy, not least because the London media always assume Marxists to be the intellectual voices of the Left, it turned Britain into the economy and society that it had initially described. But that had not been the case at the time. Still, once it had become so, then the claim could be made to have been right all along.
This all coalesced with the absurdly disproportionate influence of that tiny section of Trotskyism which, unable to think outside internal Bolshevik disputes, identified public ownership, municipal services, and at least conventional trade union activity as “Stalinist” in both the technical and the colloquial senses of the word. Well, they do not look very Stalinist now.