Manufacturing Matters

And Vince Cable is right to want to pay the best graduates to go into it rather than into the City.

While we must preserve and celebrate the pageantry and charity of the City of London, we must end its status as a tax haven and as a state within the State, Europe’s last great Medieval republican oligarchy, right where the United Kingdom ought to be.

The liberties of the City were granted to a city properly so called, with a full social range of inhabitants and workers. The Crown should explicitly guarantee the hereditary economic and cultural rights of, for example, the Billingsgate fish porters, in the same way as it guaranteed or guarantees those of Aboriginal peoples elsewhere in the Empire and the Commonwealth.

The British national interest is never to be confused with the interest of a separate state, Wall Street’s tax haven, which the Queen may not enter without special permission and where the writ of Parliament does not run, thereby denying its British inhabitants parliamentary as well as municipal democracy, since the legal rights and protections enacted by the House in which they have an elected Member do not extend to them.

A domestic manufacturing base, a largely domestic food supply, and ownership of our own industries and resources by our own citizens, are all integral to national sovereignty, including national security. Nothing has weakened the Union more than the dismantlement of the nationalised industries, which created communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, and many of which had the word “British” in their names.

Quite possibly the most important of all the State’s duties is to guarantee the economic basis of paternal authority. Few things, if any, did this better than the digging of coal to power a country largely standing on it. The same can be said of nuclear power. Requiring a union card is no different from requiring a British passport or a work permit. It was as wrong to silence the voice of the aristocratic social conscience by abolishing hereditary barons as to silence the voice of organised labour by abolishing trade union barons.

One way or another, both of those voices must be heard again, just as the economic safeguards of national sovereignty, of the Union and of paternal authority must be restored.