For years governments of every political stripe have ignored the deindustrialisation of the UK and been in thrall to the City and the service sector (Where’s the entrepreneurial state when it’s really needed,Editorial, 17 October). In 2010 the coalition announced it would cancel the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters and it appears to be running true to form over Redcar and Scunthorpe.
With the UK balance of payments the trend is clear. The UK ran a current account deficit of 3.5% of national income in 2012. The next year it rose to 4.7%. Last year, and it hit 5.9% of GDP. A major reason is the sizeable deficit on visible trade – manufactured goods,raw materials, oil and food. This is a chronic problem; there has not been a surplus on manufacturing since the early 1990s. The first precedence should be a programme of reindustrialisation, or including fostering,reinforcing and developing the industry that we have. Make it much harder for the City to treat companies as gambling chips; set up a seriously huge industrial development bank that will lend for industrial investment rather than property speculation; be alert to invoke the “manifest distress” clauses in the EU intervention rules to save industries in danger of collapse; and enact what every other EU country does and require publicly financed services to buy domestic.
Chris Hodgkins
LondonContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com