Of course there is something that could be done to Save Our Steel. But not within the EU's state aid rules.
This was all predicted 40 years ago. It was being repeated less than a year ago by the people who have apparently since taken control of the Labour Party.
Vote Leave. Then Labour can get on with being Labour.
Can Corbyn be lucky enough for the EU to say no to a state aid proposal in time for him to use it as his excuse to revert to his lifelong position just before the referendum?
ReplyDeleteCameron would have to come up with such a proposal, and he never would. Watch out for his sad face act, bemoaning that there was nothing that could have been done.
DeleteAnd what are UKIP and the Tory Right supposed to say about this, either? But 20-odd years ago, it was decided that they made more entertaining television than the normally dressed and not obviously intoxicated people whose arguments against the EU were about boring old jobs, and numbers, and facts.
The role of the EU in all of this should be enough to swing it for Brexit, explicitly to get something very left-wing done, renationalising steel. Back in the Sixties that was controversial inside the Labour Party.
ReplyDeleteYes, steel was always the controversial nationalisation. And the very controversial renationalisation, opposed even by two Labour MPs.
DeleteWoodrow Wyatt went on become the Thatcher groupie and Murdoch columnist who sired Boris Johnson's adulteress, while John Stonehouse was the Labour MP most associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs, and later the only MP ever to sit openly as an English Nationalist.
Stonehouse was also, with the extremely Thatcherite Conservative Ray Mawby, one of only two MPs ever found to have been an agent of an Eastern Bloc intelligence agency, in both cases that of Czechoslovakia. Mawby is the only Minister ever found to have been so.
Not coincidentally, steel nationalisation does not look so controversial now. How has privatisation worked out? And how much would a second renationalisation cost, especially by comparison with the cost of clearing up this mess?
Presumably, although after recent events it is a big presumption, we would not ask or allow the Chinese to build the Trident white elephant.
But it is control of our own steel industry, especially since we have the resources to exercise such control, that is genuinely central to our national security.