Lobster on the Economic Damage Caused by the Financial Sector

Lobster over the years has criticised the dominance of the financial sector over the British economy, and attacked the way this has actively harmed other sectors, particularly manufacturing industry. Thatcher, Major and then Tony Blair favoured banking and financial services over the industries, partly from economic illiteracy and partly from the conviction that Britain’s manufacturing sector was doomed. Thatcher believed very much in a strong pound and didn’t think it would harm the manufacturing industries. One of the few businessmen from that sector in Thatcher’s government tried to tell her otherwise, and show her that it would damage our exports by making them too expensive over our competitors. But Thatcher wouldn’t hear of it. She was convinced that it wouldn’t have any effect on manufacturing because the Germans had a strong manufacturing base, and they had a strong Deutschmark. The businessman tried to explain to her that the Mark was strong because they had a strong manufacturing base, not the other way around. But it was too much for the Leaderene’s brain and she refused to listen.

Thatcher also made it very clear that she was not going to help failing industries. What help there was, was supposed to come from the privatisation of state utilities and the operation of market forces. This was supposed to open up new forms of private investment. If they didn’t, then that company or industry was uncompetitive and doomed to fail. Meanwhile, the thinking went that the financial sector would take over from the failing manufacturing industries as a new source of wealth and employment. Thus Blair, Brown and the late Mo Mowlam opened up the ‘prawn cocktail’ campaign to win over the City of London, promising light regulation. One of the chief executives at the Bank of England, imported from America, was Deanne Julius, who said that Britain should abandon its manufacturing industries and allow them to be replaced by America’s. Instead, Britain should concentrate on the service industries.

This is another load of neoliberal economic rubbish that has been conclusively proved wrong. The Oxford economics professor, Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism shows that despite Thatcherite dogma, manufacturing is still crucially important for the British economy. It only looks weaker than the other sectors, because it has grown at a slower rate.

Now Robin Ramsay in the latest update to his ‘News from the Bridge’ column in Lobster 78 has published a piece actually describing the active harm the privileged position of the financial sector has done the British economy as a whole. It’s in a piece ‘The Future of Britain’s Crisis’, which begins with a few sharp observations about the impotence of the House of Commons Security and Intelligence Committee. This is supposed to supervise Britain’s intelligence services, but its lack of effective power is demonstrated by Johnson’s suppression of the report into Russian influence in UK politics. From leaks to CNN and others, it shows that rich Russians have purchased UK citizenship and poured money into Tory coffers. He states that this is just part of the price Britain has to pay for Britain being one of the leading centres of money laundering. He continues

The idea that there is a structural conflict between the interests of the manufacturing economy and that of the City has been around since the late 1970s in my experience, and probably much longer. The conflict was rarely articulated by public figures beyond the British left but in 1980, with Bank of England base rates lifted to 14% ‘to control inflation’, Sir Terence Beckett, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), told its annual conference that they had to ‘to take the gloves off and have a bare-knuckle fight’ with the Thatcher government. But no such fight ensued, Beckett resigned and in the following decade while the City boomed, British manufacturing shrank by about 20%.

The focus these days is less on structural conflict than on what is known as ‘over-financialisation’: roughly, that the financial sector gets to be too big for the rest of the economy. Recently a trio of economists/econometricians (from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield) have tried to quantify the cost of UK over-financialisation and have concluded:

‘Our calculations suggest that the total cost of lost growth potential for the UK caused by “too much finance” between 1995 and 2015 is in the region of £4,500 billion. This total figure amounts to roughly 2.5 years of the average GDP across the period.

The data suggests that the UK economy, may have performed much better in overall growth terms if: (a) its financial sector was smaller; (b) if finance was more focused on supporting other areas of the economy, rather than trying to act as a source of wealth generation (extraction) in its own right.

This evidence also provides support for the idea that the UK suffers from a form of “finance curse”: a development trajectory of financial overdependence involving a crowding out of other sectors and a skewing of social relations, geography and politics.’ [Emphases in the original.] 

On similar lines, Grace Blakeley writes in her On Borrowed Time: Finance and
the UK’s current account deficit, that

‘Rebalancing the UK’s international position requires moderating the significance of finance within the UK economy and bringing asset price volatility under control, while nurturing non-financial exporting sectors.’

Ramsay concludes the article by remarking that it would be a difficult job convincing the political establishment of this, never mind the electorate. The failure of people working within London to understand that the capital’s influence and share of the country’s wealth is harming the rest of the country has helped the rise of the Scots and Welsh Nationalists, along with less significant movements like the Yorkshire Party, the Campaign for the North and Mebyon Kernow.

See: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster78/lob78-view-from-the-bridge.pdf

£4,500 billion lost to the British economy between 1995 and 2015! 

And never mind the millions of jobs lost, the destruction of working class communities right across the country from Cornwall to Scotland and Northern Ireland, lost skills and damaged lives!

All that simply so that Thatcher’s, Blair’s, and now Boris and Rees-Mogg and their chums in the City of London could make a tidy profit.

This is proof that we need a Corbyn government that will do something for public services and manufacturing industry, rather than more of the self-serving Tory economic policies that benefits only the City.

Now Tories Troubled by Split

Yesterday, a group of three MPs, Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry, defected from the Tory party to join the Independent corporation, that had split from Labour.

At their press conference they gave three reasons why they had left. Heidi Allen said she was disgusted with the suffering the party had inflicted and its lack of benevolence. For Sarah Wollaston, it was the harm the Tories had done to the manufacturing industry. And for Anna Soubry it was the way her former party had wrecked the country with their massively inept handling of Brexit. Or it might have been Wollaston, who was most concerned about Brexit, and Soubry about the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing sector under the Tories. This is how the reasons for their departure was presented on one of the short videos on YouTube, although I got the impression from listening to Heidi Allen speaking on the 45 minute long video of their press conference put out by Channel 4 News that she was also concerned about Brexit and the attack on manufacturing, as she also ran her own manufacturing firm.

The Tories, who had previously been gleefully exploiting Chuka Umunna and company’s split from the Labour party, were left outraged in their turn. Hunt gave a speech saying how much he regretted the departure of such valued colleagues. Other Tory functionaries demanded that the Splitters should now call a bye-election. Just like the real supporters and activists in the Labour party have been demanding Umunna and his coteries of bitter Blairites do.

I don’t know how sincere Allen and her two colleagues are about the suffering caused by the Tory party. She made a number of speeches saying how upset she was by the suffering caused by her former party’s wretched welfare reforms, but voted for them all the same. So in her case it was, as Mike pointed out, a case of crocodile tears. She may be genuine, and that after years of dutifully following the party line her conscience has won at last. Or it may simply be that, like some other Tories, she’s just worried that the electorate will punish the Tories for the misery they’ve inflicted at the next election.

I think the three’s statement that they’re concerned about British manufacturing and the devastating effects of Brexit are rather more genuine. Margaret Thatcher and Blair in his turn ignored the manufacturing sector. One members of Thatcher’s cabinet, who was the only member in it from that sector of the economy, described how he couldn’t get Thatcher to understand that a strong pound would harm British manufacturing by making our products more expensive. She also uncritically accepted as an article of her neoliberal, free market dogma, that failing firms and industries should be allowed to go under, and should not be given government assistance. Which contrasted with Labour’s promotion of the National Enterprise Boards and state assistance for British industry, where the government would help firms acquire plant and equipment.

And as a good Thatcherite, Blair also adopted her destructive attitude to British industry. He was also quite happy to see British manufacturing collapse. Instead, its place at the heart of the British economy would be taken by the financial sector and the service industries. Deanne Julius, a leading official at the Bank of England, recruited from America, actually said that Britain should give up its manufacturing industry, and simply concentrate on the service industries.

The result has been that vast swathes of traditional British industry have been destroyed by Thatcherism, including mining. Which was done simply to destroy the miners’ union, so they could never overthrow a Tory government as they had Heath’s. However, as Ha Joon-Chang has shown in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, manufacturing is still an extremely important part of the British economy. It looks weak simply because it hasn’t expanded as much as the other sectors of the British economy. But if it went, the British economy would collapse completely.

As for Brexit, the past few weeks have seen company after company leave the UK because of the Tory party’s incompetence. They’re leaving because we haven’t reached a trade agreement with EU, and so the tariff barriers that will be erected after Britain leaves will make it difficult for them to sell their products after our departure. The latest firm to announce it was closing down its British plant has been Honda in Swindon. When this goes, so do 3,500 jobs.

But I doubt that this will concern those in the Tory party demanding a hard Brexit, like the odious Jacob Rees-Mogg. The financial sector has also been hit, with various banks and international financial regulators announcing that they will leave Britain for Dublin, Paris and the Netherlands. But this doesn’t seem to dismay Mogg and his comrades. They seem to be all financiers, who make their money through investing in companies around the world. And so the destruction of the British manufacturing sector simply doesn’t affect them. They’ll get their money anyway.

The Tory party is seriously split over Brexit. It was to call the Eurosceptics’ bluff that Cameron called the referendum in the first place. He was so confident that people would vote ‘remain’ that he didn’t do any proper campaigning. The result was that he was astonished when the ‘Leave’ vote prevailed. But I gather that the Tories were on the edge of splitting years before, when Tony Blair was in power. Blair stole their policies, and indeed moved further right than the Tories had dared. The party was also split between the Tory paternalists and Thatcherites, and the rural sector, which believed that British agriculture and country communities were being ignored. I’ve heard it said that if Brown had won the 2010 election, the Tories would have collapsed completely, and would have tried to rebrand themselves instead as the English Nationalists. This has the ring of truth, as I do remember one opinion piece in the Heil actually recommending that the party thus rename itself.

I hope that the departure of Allen, Wollaston and Soubry will spark a series of other defections from the Tories and bring about the party’s much-need demise. It’s brought nothing but misery and poverty to Britain’s working people since Thatcher came to power in 1979. And even if the party doesn’t collapse completely, I want there to be so many defections that at the least it causes the collapse of May’s vile, malignant, destructive government.

EU Tells Tweezer Unwelcome Fact, So Bojo Spout Nonsense as Distraction

More spin and misdirection from the Tories. Yesterday, Mike put up a piece commenting on Bojo’s bizarre utterance about building a channel bridge. He doesn’t like the Chunnel, you see, and thought that a bridge would be much better. This drew down a barrage of criticism from everyone, who had any connection or knew anything about the shipping industry. 500 ships go through the straights of Dover daily, and so the construction of the bridge, if not the structure itself, would cause massive disruption to international shipping. This was pointed out by one of the shipping associations.

The idea’s a complete non-starter.

But as Mike points out, it looks like a clever piece of misdirection on the Tories’ part. Tweezer had been told earlier that day by the EU that Brexit would mean the financial sector leaving London. This is absolutely true. The EU financial regulatory body has packed up and moved to Paris, another international financial organisation has sought pastures new overseas, and Frankfurt ‘Manhattan’ Am Main is doing its level best to encourage financial houses to relocate there.

But the Tories, and Blairite Labour, are handsomely support by the financial sector, and govern on their behalf. One Tory industrialist, who actually came from manufacturing, has said that he couldn’t get Thatcher to understand that a strong pound damaged British exports abroad. And under Blair we were told that British manufacturing was finished, and we shall concentrate on getting jobs and supporting the financial and service sectors. Deanne Julius, who was given a high-ranking post at the Bank of England after working in various American banks, actually said that we should concentrate on servicing American industry. Which shows you which way the Americans think the ‘Special Relationship’ goes.

Bojo is known for uttering nonsense, and saying things that are stupid and controversial. It seems the Tories have weaponised this. And so when the EU told Tweezer the unwelcome news, which would upset her backers in the financial sector, someone it seems prodded Bojo to make a stupid comment. Thus the bilge about a Channel Bridge, which got everyone talking about that, rather than the boring, but very real threat, that the City of London was going to be decimated by Brexit.

And I expect that as more unpleasant news comes out about the effects of Brexit, we can expect more stupidity from Bojo to take the heat away from his party, and the mistress he barely supports.

Philip Hammond Wants to Turn Britain into Neoliberal Tax Haven for the Rich

This is more evidence of the Tories’ obsession with turning Britain into ‘America junior’. On Sunday Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece about the current chancellor, Philip Hammond’s interview with the German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, in which he said that if Britain could not gain access to European markets after Brexit, it would allow the country to turn away from the European political and economic model. Instead of following the ‘European-style’ social model, with high taxation and regulation, Britain would become ‘something different’.

Mike called this Tory stupidity and arrogance at its worst, and he’s right. Britain cannot win a trade war with Europe. Europe constitutes more than half of the market for Britain’s exports. And every time Theresa May opens her trap about Brexit, investors take fright and the pound plummets to a new level. Mike’s article quotes Jeremy Corbyn as saying that he expected the majority of MPs to be worried about Hammond’s ideas. And he’s right. Mike predicts that Hammond’s idea would result in massive unemployment, as exclusion from the European market means that demands for our products would fall. Furthermore, the low taxation Hammond so glowingly looks forward to would mean that the state would receive less. Mike doesn’t point out what that means, but it’s fairly obvious: state expenditure would immediately slashed, meaning even more welfare cuts, the further rationing and privatisation of the NHS and the education system.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/01/15/seriously-philip-hammond-youd-cripple-our-economy-for-some-anti-eu-sabre-rattling/

Of course, this is precisely what the Tories have wanted ever since Thatcher. They want to make Britain more like the USA, with its private healthcare system and minimal welfare provision. It’s an economy which has traditionally been based on low taxes, although under Bush the people of America actually started paying nearly the same amount in tax as the people in this country because of the vast military expenditure. At least, that’s what I was told by American friends. However, Bush made a series of tax cuts, followed by Obama with more promised by Trump, which will deprive the poor of even further employment protection and welfare benefits in favour of massive tax cuts for the rich. Just like Cameron and May have done and are doing for the Tories.

Hammond’s moronic idea is not original either. It’s just a continuation of Cameron’s attempts to stop the EU extending its financial regulations over Britain, so that London could become the centre of the global fraud that constitutes offshore banking.

It also shows the absolute ignorance and contempt of Thatcherite economists for the manufacturing industry. Thatcher’s cabinet was dominated by people from the financial sector, as was Blair’s, Broon’s, and, I assume, Cameron’s and May’s. There was one cabinet member, whose background was in manufacturing, who tried to point out to Thatcher that her pursuit of a strong pound would harm British manufacturing industry, as it would make our products more expensive than our foreign competitors. But she couldn’t understand this basic economic fact. As for Tony Blair, he rejected the manufacturing sector, as it was economic dogma during his tenure of No. 10 that the financial sector would become the major industry in the UK. We were supposed to be a ‘post-industrial economy’. Deanne Julius, one of the experts at the Bank of England, and a former officer with one of the big American banks, actually said that we should give up manufacturing and concentrate on the service sector. Manufacturing industry, she believed, should be left to the Americans.

Ha-Joon Chang has pointed out in his books how wrong this attitude is. Britain is still very dependent on its manufacturing industries. These are less significant than they were, because they have not grown as much as the financial and service sectors, but are still very important parts of our economy. If this part of our economy contracts even further, it will be disastrous for the British economy as a whole.

Not that you will hear that from the Blairites or the Tories. New Labour was very keen not to be seen as the party of high state regulation. During the ‘prawn cocktail offensive’ in the late ’80s, Broon and Mo Mowlam went round the City reassuring the bankers that New Labour would adopt a ‘light touch’ attitude to regulating the financial sector.

And we can all see how well that paid off, with the great financial crash of 2008. We’re still paying for that. Not the bankers, not the big industrialists, but the ordinary people of Britain, who are seeing are tax bills go up, our welfare benefits and employment rights taken away, and the NHS sold off to private contractors, all to give the 1 per cent even more tax breaks.

And last Sunday, Philip Hammond told the German press he wanted more of the same, but much worse.

This shows his and May’s attitude to Britain’s working people. They are to be forced into even more precarity, with fewer opportunities for employment and massive poverty. Because Hammond wants to make his bankster friends in the City even richer.

And defend the NHS. May and Hunt should resign. Now.

John McConnell Promises National Investment Bank and £500 Billion Credit for UK

Mike over at Vox Political has put up another piece today, which reports that Jeremy Corbyn’s deputy, John McConnell, has promised to set up a National Investment Bank, tied in with a network of regional banks, to regenerate Britain’s communities and revive Britain’s industries after years of neglect. The bank is based on the German Development Bank. In addition, he promised £500 billion of investment. This follows Owen Smith’s promise when launching his leadership campaign this week end, to introduce a British ‘New Deal’, and an investment programme of £200 billion.

See Mike’s article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/18/labour-pledges-national-investment-bank-to-mobilise-500bn/

Both McConnell and Smith are right about investment in British firms by the British state being sorely needed. But McConnell is absolutely correct about the necessity of a special British investment bank to channel the money and provide the necessary credit. It’s been needed for decades. The authors of the 1s987 book, Socialist Enterprise, noted that the British financial sector was structured into investing abroad, and recommended the creation of such a bank. Neil Kinnock, in his 1987 book, Making Our Way, recognised the need for it. G.D.H. Cole, in his book, Great Britain in the Post-War World, written as long ago as 1942, recommended a similar radical reform of the banking industry. That should tell you how desperately it’s needed, and why McConnell is right.

Han-Joon Chang, in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, argues in one of his chapters that it simply isn’t true that we are living in a post-industrial society. Britain still has a manufacturing industry, and it’s still immensely important. It only appears unimportant, because it hasn’t grown as much as the financial sector. It is, however, still of fundamentally vital importance to our economy.

All of this, of course, will be unwelcome news to the Tory party and New Labour. Both of these turned to subsidising and supporting the financial sector as an alternative to, and at the expensive of, manufacturing. One of the functionaries Blair appointed to the Bank of England was an American banker, Deanne Julius, who stated that Britain should give up manufacturing products and leave that to America. As for the Conservatives, half of their funding at the last election came from the City of London. They have no interest and absolutely no desire to aid a British manufacturing revival. Not if it means having to spend government money, rather than rely on a bail-out by a foreign firm.

Way back in the 1970s the late Tony Benn tried something similar. The government set up various zones, and schemes in which firms could receive government grants to renovate and modernise plant and equipment. I don’t think it was taken up, and British firms continued to lag behind their foreign competitors. And the result has been the decimation of British industry in the decades since Thatcher took power.

McConnell and Benn stand for British industry, and investment to create real jobs and economic growth. All Maggie Thatcher did was cut, and hope foreign firms would come in to invest in what was left. All the while favouring the financial sector and her friends in the City. It also shows the hollowness of the Tories’ claim to represent British industry. They don’t. Labour represents industry, and the people who work in it. The Tories simply represent capital and those, who own it. The very people, who seem to enjoy increased bonuses and share options by cutting down to the point of destroying the very firms they manage.

Vox Political on the Tories and Tata’s Proposed Sale of British Steel

One of the big stories in industry this week is Tata’s proposed sell-off of what remains of the British steel industry. Mike makes the point that while David Cameron is spouting about how the government is doing everything it can, their actions speak much louder than words. And their actions say that they aren’t concerned at all.

Cameron himself is on holiday in Lanzarote. The Business Minister, Sajid Javid, who one of the wags in Private Eye’s ‘Lookalikes’ column suggested looks like the Claw from Thunderbirds, was thousands of miles away Downunder appearing at a business banquet. It was left to Anna Soubry, the Small Business minister, to make a plea for more time. By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn was at one of the steelworks in Port Talbot, and issued a demand to Cameron to recall parliament and take steps to protect the British steel industry.

Mike also points out that other countries have taken steps to protect their iron and steel industries, and that during the financial crisis two banks were nationalised. This raises the question why the government isn’t doing the same for the steel industry.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/31/these-images-show-how-labour-is-standing-up-for-steel-while-the-tories-are-standing-idle/

Cameron did fly back from Lanzarote yesterday. However, while Soubry had made a vague suggestion that the steel industry would be renationalised, Javid ruled this out. Mike, however, makes the point that by ruling out nationalisation, Cameron is most definitely not doing everything he can. See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/31/if-cameron-has-ruled-out-nationalising-tata-steel-hes-not-doing-everything-he-can/

Mike has also posted a further article showing how even the usually solid Torygraph has turned against the Conservatives for this. Osborne’s refusal to rescue the British steel industry seems to be to avoid antagonising the Chinese. He has for years resisted the kind of legislation the Americans have passed to prevent the Chinese dumping cheap steel to the destruction of their own domestic industry. It looks very much Osbo is deliberately sacrificing our steel industry in order to stay in favour with the Chinese, and encourage them to keep investing in Britain.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/31/britain-sacrifices-steel-industry-to-curry-favour-with-china/

I’m not surprised by Cameron’s blanket refusal to nationalise the industry. The Tories have been consistently against its nationalisation after it was first done by Clement Atlee’s government. Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Supply, proposed its denationalisation in 1952, claiming that privatisation would restore to the industry ‘independence, initiative and enterprise’ which was not possible under nationalisation. He was opposed by Sir George Strauss in the Labour party, who said that it was ‘indefensible for the control of this industry-on which depends our economy- the fate of townships and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of employees-to rest in the hands of people with no public responsibility’. It’s a statement that still applies today at Tata’s announcement they want to sell the plant. The iron and steel industry was renationalised by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1966. The steel industry itself by that time had recognised the need for reorganisation. Moreover, Labour was in favour of nationalisation because iron and steel was one of the ‘commending heights’ of industry, and so should be occupied by Britain. The Tories started privatising the industry again in the 1980s under Ian MacGregor. Their aim was to cut the cost to the taxpayer, while at the same time they considered that the business of the steel industry should be to make steel, rather than create jobs. Clearly, that attitude has not changed.

The manufacturing industries also suffer from the perception, disseminated by neo-Liberal free-marketeers over the last thirty years, that Britain is now a post-industrial society. Deanne Julius, who was one of the chief wonks in the Bank of England under Blair, took this view, and stated that we should now concentrate on developing the service industries, and leave manufacturing to the rest of the world, and specifically America. This is another idea that Han-Joon Chang shoots down in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. He makes the point that manufacturing industry is still vitally important. It only looks less important than the service industries, because these have expanded far more and more rapidly than manufacturing. But that certainly does not mean that it’s unimportant.

Except to the Tories. Cameron is not going to renationalise the iron and steel industry, because as a neo-lib he’s devoted to the idea that government should not interfere – market forces and all that gibberish – and that if the industry goes under, well, that’s how it should be. Some how the market will magically correct the situation and another industry will somehow arise to replace it. This seems to me to be the fundamental attitude of the followers of von Hayek and the other Libertarians. He also won’t want to nationalise the industry, because it will mean not only a fundamental contradiction of Neo-Liberal economic doctrine, but also because it’ll mean more state expenditure. Which in turn will mean he won’t be able to give more tax cuts to his big business paymasters.

And lastly, he won’t want to nationalise the industry, because the last thing he wants is a rise in employment, and the revival of an organised and powerful working class, as it was when manufacturing was the dominant industry. Milton Friedman’s wretched Monetarism dictates that there should be a six per cent unemployment rate to keep wages low, and labour affordable.

And finally, there is the issue of class. Whatever Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith spout to the contrary, the Tories are not the policy of ‘working people’. They themselves admit as much. When the issue of the union’s funding of the Labour party came up again a few years ago, Labour made the point that the Tories were being funded by business. The Tories attempted to defend themselves by stating that this was perfectly acceptable, as they were the party of business. And in this case, business does not want state involvement in industry and the creation of nasty, old-style working class jobs that might actually empower the working class.

And also part of it is that the working class simply aren’t considered a concern, in the same way that the Tories are concerned about the upper and middle classes. Cameron’s a toff, as is Osbo and Ian Duncan Smith. The people, who matter to them are the same people as themselves – other toffs and members of the upper middle class. Those are the only people they see personally and interact with, except those they employ. And so ordinary people and their concerns simply don’t register with them in the same way as those of their own class.

And so, while Cameron has come back from Lanzarote, because this is a major issue, it’s not one that he really wants to solve by going back to nationalising the industry. Not when Maggie Thatcher and generations of Tories took so much trouble to privatise it.

Vox Political: Tories Led Campaign to Block EU Attempts to Protect Steel Industry

This is further proof of how much contempt the Tories actually have for heavy industry in this country, and the men and women, who work in it. Yesterday Mike ran this story from the Mirror Online, that reported that the Tories, far from seeking to protect the British steel industry, actually assisted the importation of cheap steel from China that’s destroying it: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/10/tories-block-bid-to-help-uk-steel-industry-are-they-traitors-or-simply-enemies-of-the-people/

The article reports that while the Americans slapped a 66% tariff on Chinese imports, the EU only raised theirs by 9%. This was due mostly to Britain.

Unbelievable. But not surprising.

For all their mouthing about being the party of ‘industry’, the Tories – and Blairite New Labour, come to that – represent only a small part of it: the financial sector. They have no understanding of or interest in the needs of the manufacturing sector. One of the Thatcher’s ministers, the only man in her cabinet to come from manufacturing industry, said he couldn’t get the Leaderene to understand how a strong pound actually hurt Britain by making British goods expensive for the rest of the world. Not that Thatcher and her successor, Major, had any sympathy for heavy industry anyway. She destroyed the coal industry, and Major administered the coup de grace because heavy industry means strong unions. And it was the NUM that defeated Ted Heath. The 1984 Miner’s Strike was phase 2 of the conflict, in which the Tories decided they were going to be the winner. And so they were, at the cost of the British coal industry.

The British financial sector is geared to overseas investment. This has been pointed out repeated by everyone from Kinnock, before he converted to the Thatcherite free market, and ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. And its true. New Labour practically caved into the City when Broon and Mo Mowlan made their ‘prawn cocktail’ offensive to win City backing for New Labour. One of the apparatchiks they installed at the Bank of England, Deanne Julius, was previously a staple of the American banking system. She stated that Britain should get out of manufacturing and concentrate instead on service industries.

So it was almost a foregone conclusion that the Tories would definitely not try to protect was remains of British heavy industry from the Chinese. And particularly as Cameron has spent the past few years shuttling back and forth from the Chung Kuo trying to get the Chinese to invest in Britain. Like building roads, new nuclear power stations and so forth. And obviously, for all this to happen, British industry must suffer in the process.

And again, what really galls is the crass hypocrisy. They claim to be the patriotic party, stoutly defending Britain’s interests against Johnny Foreigner. Remember Thatcher’s 1987 election broadcast, which featured footage of Spitfires zooming about the skies, while an excited voice enthused ‘Man was born free’ and ended with ‘It’s great… to be great again’. Alan Coren took this apart the next weekend on the News Quiz, when he drily described it as showing the Royal Conservative Airforce, and reminded everyone that the first thing the servicemen did when they came back from the War was overwhelmingly vote Labour.

And the EU naturally looms large in the Tory demonology as a monstrous foreign power determined to destroy Britain. Well, in this case, the opposite is true. The EU would have helped Britain. The people, who killed our industry this time, are the patriotic flag wavers of the Tory party. The old saying’s right: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’

Financial Times Review of Book on Origins of American Financial Imperialism

Also looking through the pile of past newspaper clippings I’ve collected, I found this review by David Honigmann of Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy 1900-1930, by Emily S. Rosenberg, published by Harvard, in the FT’s weekend supplement for 11th/12th March 2000.

The Real Costs of an Empire on Loan

At the end of the 19th century, the US was acquiring an empire by default, picking up colonial possessions and exerting a sphere of influence it did not quite know how to handle. When the 1896 selection turned on the question of currency reform and the gold-standard advocates won, the next step to export the gold standard to the scattered territories under US control. It spread from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, then Panama, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico. Eventually, US financial advisers would by plying their trade as far afield as China, Germany and Persia.

Dollar diplomacy was the term coined for an arrangement under which struggling economies would receive loans from US banks in return for accepting “supervision” from American economic advisers. The story of the public-private partnership that tried to bring this about is the subject of Emily Rosenberg’s meticulously researched book.

She traces the three parties involved in pushing dollar diplomacy. Investment banks, anxious for new markets, provided the loans. Academics made, in some cases, small fortunes from providing the advice: Edwin Kemmerer, who became the high priest of dollar diplomacy, made many times his already generous Princeton salary from grateful client governments. (Rosenberg cites personal correspondence to show that Kemmerer was obsessed with the inadequacy of his salary and what this meant for his manliness.

The third party underpinning all this was the US State Department, which played an ambiguous role in approving the loans. Each loan went to the State Department for approval, and when approval was granted there was at least a tacit expectation by lenders that the US government was backing it, protection which could take any form from ambassadorial murmurings to the dispatch of the Marines.

Banking was a contested area at the time. The gold standard, with its tendency to deflation, was inimical to small farmers and small businessmen. Marxists condemned it as materialism in action, and opposition to it also drew on a strain of populist anti-Semitism. (In the 1896 election, the Democrats warned against “crucifying mankind upon a Cross of Gold”.)

Attitudes to dollar diplomacy did not split evenly along political lines, however. When President (Theodore) Roosevelt, in 1905, halted the Dominican Republic’s slide towards bankruptcy by turning it into a US fiscal protectorate, and then built it into a model of dollar diplomacy, there was little anti-imperialist protest. The plan was seen essentially as extending “assistance without annexation”.

It was only as client countries began to rebel against the conditions and policies imposed to accompany loans (the Sandino rebellion in Nicaragua in the late 1920s being the most visible) that progressive domestic opposition and the Comintern rallied to denounce it.

Rosenberg dives deepest into the professional advisers and their search for respectability. this was the foundation of the whole system: the professionalism of the advisers reduced the perceived risk of the loans, lowering their price and making them affordable for the client countries. The advisers presented themselves as impartial third parties, aloof from both US governmental interests and the banks, responsible only to client governments. In fact, they received considerable support behind the scenes from the State Department, and Kemmerer was also kept on a secret annual retainer by Dillon Read, one of the investment banks: not so much Chinese walls as Hall of Mirrors.

Despite the technocratic claims of the advisers, dollar diplomacy was not a clean, value-free exercise. Rosenberg locates its roots in the cultural debates of the early 20th century. The Tarzan books and films were only one example of the ways in which other nations and peoples were framed as “primitive” and in need of western assistance.

Dollar diplomacy even became the subject of poplar entertainment, as in Edison’s 1917 film Billy and the Big Stick, whose hero was an American customs officer in Haiti, denied his salary by the Haitian president until he threatens the dispatch of gunboats. All very explicit, it might seem; in fact, as Rosenberg notes, it was the US financial adviser in Haiti who sopped the wages of Haitian officials until they agreed to his proposals.

The crux of Rosenberg’s argument is that dollar diplomacy cloaked geo-politics in the guise of market contracts, but with the iron first ill-concealed in the velvet glove. She draws a parallel with Victorian marriage contracts: “the dominant (male) party promised monetary support (loans) and supervision in return for obedience and acceptance of regulation. Yet, also like marriage, the status inequalities were embedded in the controlled loan contracts of dollar diplomacy, even as the contracts tended to be culturally presented as freely negotiated and based on mutual attraction.”

Financial Missionaries to the World is not easy reading. It is full enough of fiscal minutiae that even fairly central concepts, such as financing currency conversion through seniorage, go unexplained. There is no argument that is not a discourse, no assumption that is not a paradigm, no subordination that is not a “feminization”.

But it works well in explaining how this policy of arm’s length financial administration arose, how it was sustained by cultural pressures in the teeth of growing opposition from both isolationist Right and anti-colonialist Left, and how it eventually collapsed in the gale of the 1929 Crash and a series of armed rebellions.

Rosenberg does briefly trace the evolution of dollar diplomacy through Bretton Woods and the rise of the IMF, although a less scholarly book might have drawn even more explicit parallels with the financial regimens imposed by today’s multinational institutions. But perhaps the warnings are all too clear.

That last paragraph is important. The IMF and the World Bank certainly do act as instruments of American economic imperialism. When countries go for them for loan, these are given with a set prescribed conditions to rectify those nations’ ailing economies: they are to private the state industries and cut down on state expenditure generally, including removing or cutting back on any welfare support they may provide their citizens. The privatised industries are to be sold to American companies.

And the Americans haven’t just tried this with Developing Nations. They’ve done it to us as well. The British Empire was dismembered partly due to pressure from the Americans for their help during the Second World War, as they wanted to open up the closed imperial trading bloc to American companies. And they’ve continued interfering in our economic affairs afterwards. According to Lobster, one of the chiefs and head executives at the Bank of England under Bliar was Deanne Julius, a high ranking official within the American banking system. She believed that Britain should abandon its role as a manufacturer and concentrate instead on servicing American global financial interests.