Thursday, 18 February 2010
Putting The B Back Into BAE
There can be neither national sovereignty, nor cultural integrity, nor lasting prosperity, without a solid manufacturing base. Secure, high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment is absolutely vital economically, socially, culturally and politically. So BAE's gigantic losses should be the spur to take it back into public ownership as the monopoly supplier to our Armed Forces and to no one else, with a ban, perhaps introduced progressively but nevertheless becoming total as rapidly as possible, on the sale of arms abroad. Once, we were known as the Workshop of the World. But now, we have become the Merchant of Murder.
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Even when we were the workshop of the world most of our money (just) came from commerce and finance (Rubinstein - Capitalism, Culture and Decline).
ReplyDeleteDefine commerce.
ReplyDeleteBut anyway, the point stands: the making of real things is the non-negotiable bedrock of enduring prosperity, as well as being indispensible to national sovereignty and to cultural integrity, not least (though by no means exclusively) because it secures high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.
For those reasons, it is a duty of the State to safeguard the manufacturing base, together with the morality of that base's, as of anything else's, character and conduct.
Commerce in what? For that matter, finance of what? David is right.
ReplyDelete