Why do politicians keep failing us on the economy?

Published: 1 September, 2011

• IN your Comment (Foreign takeover malaise – a curious British disease, August 25) you express the feelings of the vast majority of Britons who simply cannot understand why those we elect to safeguard the interests of the country persistently fail to do so when it comes to our economy.

Why does this happen?

The answer is simple: our entire political class (as a class) has signed up to the laissez-faire quasi religion.

Those on the right have embraced the ideology, at first as a means to crush the power of the unions (remember Margaret Thatcher celebrating the demise of our great manufacturing and extractive industries?) and then to roll back the state; those on the left became free marketeers because they have realised that free trade and a laissez-faire approach in the domestic market is the most powerful dissolver of the nation state there is.

Is there anything we can do to change matters?

The truth is precious little lawfully while we are part of the EU and signed up to trade treaties such as those of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

However, lawfully in the international sphere is rather different from lawfully in Britain.

Other nations both within and without the EU do ignore laws which apply to trade and competition.

The USA regularly imposes tariffs without suffering sanctions  from the WTO (those imposed on steel imports to the USA several years ago are a good example) and the likes of France and Germany routinely defend their great national companies and provide state aid which is illegal under EU competition law without being brought to book (the EU imposes fines but France and Germany refuse to pay them).

The better, honest, way out of such legal obligations is, of course, for Britain to leave the EU.

Will the government do anything to change matters?

No it will not. The business secretary Vince Cable wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph on August 28.

In it he makes it clear that not only will there be no new law to prevent takeovers of companies such as Cadbury or Autonomy, but the government will positively encourage foreign companies viz: “we welcome overseas companies who work to make British manufacturing great again” and “the new industrial Britain challenges our traditional ideas about patriotism”.

The latter passage is pure Newspeak: to Orwell’s War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery and Knowledge is Ignorance we can now add Treason is Patriotism.

Protecting British industries is about more than economics, important as that is.

It is also a vital part of national security.  

If a country is not self-sufficient in food, water, energy, and with the ability to manufacture all essential goods, it becomes prey to international blackmail.

Looking after our own interests is simple common sense.

ROBERT HENDERSON
Chalton Street, NW1