Ministers were asleep at the wheel as the industry struggled,but its unbelievable how an EU referendum concentrates the mindIt would maintain seemed beyond belief at the start of the year: a Conservative government wedded to free-market principles with a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite as trade secretary announcing that it is prepared to part-nationalise Tata Steel’s UK assets.
So let’s start with the obvious. There has been no Damascene conversion to the need for a more interventionist industrial strategy. This is not the start of a rolling back of the privatisations undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s. David Cameron has not morphed into Ted Heath, the last Tory prime minister to embrace state ownership.
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Source: theguardian.com