The Present State of Economy and Society

Official statistics are compiled by honest professional people, and tell the 'truth' in simple numerical terms. But much can be done to interpret them, either favourably or unfavourably, according to the wish of the interpreter. Hence, although the United Kingdom now has the highest proportion of its available adult citizens in employment since 1975 [one of the three years during which the mixed economy was tested most severely] it is sobering to note that in almost every way the present pattern of employment is massively more fragile than was that which NeoKeynesian inflation undermined. The effect of the inflation of prices, especially after the oil price hike of 1973, was that production was interrupted by strikes when the authorities took action to suppress wage rises in their clumsy attempts to cap the wage-price spiral. In each period of pay 'restraint' government costs rose while government revenues declined, and the balance of payments with the rest of the world became strongly negative. In those circumstances, the Labour government [which relied on minority parties to retain control of the House of Commons] sought a loan from the International Monetary Fund; and the conditions applied to that loan [in retrospect] can be seen as a demand for the state to bring in Monetarist policies to replace they failed pseudo Keynesianism that the Economic establishment had applied.

The Labour Party was torn apart by the consequent dissent from the new policy, with the trade unions - the traditional paymasters of the party - doggedly opposed to the government. Consequently the Conservatives won the 1989 general election. The new Tory leader, the largely-unknown and completely untested Margaret Thatcher, embraced monetarism enthusiastically; and she deplored the less-than-half-hearted attitude towards her radical policies from most of the Tory establishment [including most of her cabinet]. They had been broadly content with the mixed economy and were scared by the new radicalism. Mrs Thatcher and her close cohort dismissed the majority as 'wets', and became more intent on radical change in the economy. As to the social consequences of disruptive economic policies, Mrs Thatcher was simply to say 'There is no such thing as Society'.

The people who could be identified as the 'enemies' of the new Monetarist policies began with the Economists, 364 of whom signed a letter to the TIMES condemning her policies from a standpoint of NeoKeynesianism [and who succumbed thereafter, with amazing speed, so that those who remained in their 'profession' become locked in to the new Econocracy by the millennium]. Next among the 'enemies' were the trade unions, that had frustrated the attempts by the Labour government of 1974-79 to control the wage-price spiral. Here the Thatcher gang decided on a radical solution: if you close the coal mines and a large section of the iron and steel industry [including shipbuilding] you take the cash and the members away from the unions, leaving them as shell organisations with no real power. These radical solutions were adopted; and the majority of the electorate was unmoved by the pleas of miners and steel workers whose communities were largely isolated geographically and socially from the cities where banking, finance and smart retailing were providing more nice, clean jobs for the middle classes. While the traditionally unionised areas continued to return Labour MPs from constituencies with very high percentages of the industrial and ex-industrial population, other urban centres and the less-densely-populated majority of constituencies were content to return Tory [or, in some cases, irrelevant Liberal] MPs; and thus the wrecking job was done.

It is now more than thirty years since the steelworks of Sheffield, the pit sites across the country with their unmistakable winding-gear, the massive cranes on the dockyards to the Tyne and the Tees and the Upper Clyde, and other symbols of the most basic and essential industries were first left derelict; then cleared away. It is hard to believe that Meadowhall in Sheffield was once the world's leading steel and engineering centre, or that the placid banks of the Upper Clyde were once the proudest shipyards in the world.

No thanks to successive governments, pharmaceutical and biological companies have developed lucrative new products; creative industries [including computer games] have developed magnificently and - despite the idiocies that created the financial crisis of 2007-9 - the financial services based in London lead the world in expertise and innovation. So Britain has high spots, and remains uniquely innovative; but fools in government have congratulated themselves on 'attracting inward investment' as one after another the innovative firms [along with the intellectual capital] are snapped up by aliens. This almost-constant alienation of the most valuable assets that the British continue to create means that the balance-of-payments becomes increasingly adverse, as British consumers have to pay foreign firms to access British inventions, even if they are manufactured here.


The final knell of heavy industry has been sounded today, with the news that Tata is selling its steelworks in the UK to Thyssen-Krupp: whatever promises are made [and especially if we really do leave the European Economic Area] Port Talbot will go; and with it the last evidence of heavy industry will be consigned to the film archives and to history books.

A Board of Trade?

Fifty hours before the polling stations open for the General Election, I first heard the suggestion from the Tory party that the Board of Trade should be revived, with the intention to drum up trade for the UK after Brexit.

A Liberal Democrat source was reported to have given the snap reaction that this was a seventeenth-century 'solution' to a twenty-first century problem. That was a clever comment, and it shows a fair knowledge of history; but it also shows that that source has not yet caught up with President Trump's thinking. As I have pointed out in this column recently, the policies that secured Mr Trump's election victory can be characterised as reminiscent of some that flourished in the seventeenth-century. I have suggested that Mr Trump has thought on parallel lines to those of the great J-B Colbert, who built up in the French economy massively in the reign of Louis XIV. But I explicitly said that I had no apprehension that Mr Trump was consciously citing mercantilist writers: my view is that in the present conditions of global trade and technology it is entirely rational to form policies that have resonances similar to those that worked triumphantly in the mid-seventeenth century; and through the eighteenth century, in those countries where they were intelligently applied.

Britain had a Board of Trade for centuries. It was allowed to become dormant - as a committee - in the very early twentieth century, though it was not abolished; and successive Archbishops of Canterbury were surprised to find that they were members of the Board which never met. The title President of the Board of Trade was given to a member of the government who bore some responsibility for trade matters|, including the supervision of the insurance industry until Gordon Brown's restructuring of financial services when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ancient titles, including Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Lord Privy Seal, remain to this day to be allocated to 'spare' ministers whose duties are determined on a short-term basis by the Prime Minister.

The new Board of Trade, if it is established, is seen as a body which will find customers for British products and services in the post-Brexit world; and seek 'inward investment' to the UK. The second of these objectives indicates that the little thinking that has been applied to the concept follows on from the second most destructive of the policy imperatives that was laid down by George Osborne. The ruinous policy of austerity [which Mrs May implemented at the Home Office in the reduction in the police force] was Osborne's number one priority. Osborne's number two objective was to attract 'inward investment' to the country; and its consequence was to sell infrastructure and the companies that operate it [such as water, power supply and railways] to foreigners. For a one-off sum flowing into the British economy, control of the firms and the income streams that they attract go to foreigners; and thereafter British consumers pay tribute to the alien owners. Even more damaging was the succession of innovative firms that had established now intellectual property that were sold to foreign owners before they had even begun to make significant profits for UK investors. Those investors, and the inventors themselves, were well-paid for surrendering their rights to future returns from the companies that could make vast amounts of money for their owners: to whom British users of the products and services would have to pay high retail prices.

Even the Econocracy* have recognised that Britain's economy is blighted by low productivity. This blog has repeatedly emphasised that productivity follows on from productiveness. As was emphasised in Millicent Fawcett's Political Economy for Beginners [1870] productiveness is the situation where firms make profits which they can invest in improving their products and processes and thus raise the productivity of their businesses. That key fact has been ignored by Economists since 1890, to the massive detriment of the economy. Selling the profit stream that comes into a business to a foreign firm gives the aliens the option to invest where they see fit, and often does nothing to enhance British productivity. So it looks as if the Tories have found yet another way of despoiling the economy, at no benefit to the population.

* For an explanation of ECONOCRACY, refer to the website of the Manchester Post-Crash Economics Society.