The steel crisis has revealed the inherent problems with the post Thatcher Tory party. It believes the state has no place in either business or markets. Unless state intervention drives up capital values or supports property prices and low wage costs. So billions are used to subsidise excessive rents and low wages or to support house purchase and billions more are printed to prop up a blown financial sector, but when a strategic industry like steel runs into crisis the initial reaction is to let the markets run their course. It then finds itself so far on the wrong side of public opinion that it has to react to stop a political crisis. The result is a rudderless muddle while the steel industry is left distraught and in limbo. Meanwhile the the balance of payments deficit, or current account deficit, reaches and all time record. UK exports are floundering. The march of the makers has become a joke.
Just as an untended garden where nature is left to take control unchecked becomes at first attractive and then a wilderness, so handing over control of the economy to the markets is at first a breath of fresh air leading to healthy expansion, only to become a chaotic structure in which some countries have all the cash and the others have all the debt. Moreover this leads to those whose income relies on assets never having it so good and those whose labour drives the fabric of civilised living having it not good at all.
So our country finds itself indebted to the world at large as never before and faced with a mounting industrial and energy crisis as more and more resources are taken to fund and subsidise rising costs and falling real income, with little to no new wealth creation. To counter this there is a need for a bold new plan. Free of busted ideologies and nostrums which favour the few over the many, in which the state is a player, indeed a leader, and markets are organised to develop a contribution not just for their own benefit but also for the public good.
