Kevin McKenna writes:
It was the Queen I felt for most last week.
As head of
the Church of England we can only guess at the maelstrom of emotions in her
head as she welcomed the president of China to her table at Buckingham Palace.
Being one of the world’s most influential Christian leaders, Good Queen
Elizabeth will not be unaware that Xi Jinping has
been an enthusiastic participant in one of his country’s most popular civic
pastimes: giving the Christians a right good kicking and keeping them down.
Of
course, diplomatic protocol forbids the Queen even having a word in the ear of
Xi about the intimidation of Christians and the routine torture and murder of
Chinese citizens if they speak out of turn.
The close relatives of
President Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania must have gained solace from the
knowledge he went to his death by firing squad comforted by the still-fresh images
of his red-carpet treatment by the Queen several years before.
But that’s the
Queen for you, friend of the friendless, comforter of murderous dictators
everywhere.
And you have to feel sorry for
David Cameron too.
There he was, having cleared four days in his calendar to
bow and scrape to this dismal sociopath in the hope that the vile Chinese
government would choose the UK to be its principal trading partner in Europe.
The things you have to do these days to save British jobs. Mind you, they do
have to be the right sorts of jobs.
Obviously, the thousands of UK
jobs that went up in smoke last week as a direct result of China dumping cheap,
inferior and state-assisted steel into the marketplace was unfortunate and,
goodness gracious me, the timing could have been better.
But what are a few
thousand steel jobs and an entire heavy industry in truculent Scotland when there’s the chance to do business
with the world’s richest dictatorship?
Placed alongside the obvious
discomfort and embarrassment to the Queen and her prime minister, the steelworkers who
lost their jobs and their families don’t really have much to worry about at
all.
If they’d been reading the right sort of newspapers they would have
discovered that the globalisation that put paid to their jobs has actually made
them richer and happier, job or no job.
Don’t they know that millions fewer
people all over the world are living in “absolute poverty” and that median
incomes have grown by more than 75%, according to the World Bank?
Surely they must know that, under Conservative doctrine,
the rule of the marketplace and of competition must be paramount in every facet
of British life, even when you’re trading with a country that murders its
citizens, strangles free speech, artificially distorts the marketplace and
breaks the rules of competition?
Such is the anthem of the hard
right that now holds sway in this country and that was sung all week by its
acolytes: move along, nothing to see here.
It’s just another heavy industry
being dismantled and a working-class community whingeing for state intervention
and, ha-ha, nationalisation.
The change to Westminster’s
standing orders that will exclude Scottish MPs from voting on English-only
matters was just the cherry on top for the Tory hard right.
It was their way of
saying: “We’re the masters now.”
North of the border, perhaps we should
consider reserving our taxes for Scotland-only services.
And just be thankful that you’re even getting £6.50 an hour because
millions of others born in the wrong country don’t even have roofs over their
heads.
We are told that globalisation sets its own rules and that there is
nothing you or I can do about it and that the state cannot intervene artificially
to save economically stricken communities.
It all depends, though, on whether
you belong to the right kind of community.
Will preserving what remains of
the steel industry in Scotland and a plant in Scunthorpe cost the taxpayer as
much as it did (and continues to do) in 2008 when the state partially
nationalised the banks and pumped in £500bn of our money to prop them up?
Criminal behaviour, corruption and lies had brought some of these banks to
their knees yet they were rewarded with a bail-out that cost each family in the
UK more than £2,000.
The conditions attached, such as lending more to small
businesses, ending the culture of grotesque bonuses and smaller home deposits,
have all been cheerfully ignored.
Perhaps if the steelworkers had been farmers they might
have expected some government intervention.
In 2001, the government spent
almost £1bn compensating farmers following the foot and mouth disease and made 37 of them overnight millionaires amid claims from within the National
Farmers’ Union itself that the compensation system had been rigged.
Nor were
some in the farming community brought to book for many of the questionable and
risky feeding practices that partly contributed to foot and mouth.
The steelworkers, though, are a
different breed: they are expendable and, just like the miners and the
shipbuilders, when their time comes, the rest of us are told that they didn’t
upskill enough and were hostile to change management.
They were working in a
dying industry. Yet the last time I looked the world was still using lots of
coal, many people were still using ships to sail the seas and steel is still
used in the construction of bridges and buildings.
And if demand ever wanes
then we can get the Americans, supported by us, of course, to start a wee war
somewhere.
The artificially depressed steel
prices will not remain so and will climb again, so nationalising the industry
for a few years, as we did with the banks and effectively did with the farmers,
makes sense.
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government must expedite the
temporary nationalisation of the two steel plants in Motherwell and Cambuslang.
The price for doing this must be set against the cost, for the next three
generations, of unemployment and the physical and mental wellbeing of a
community.
If millionaire bankers and
affluent gentlemen farmers are worth saving, then so are our steelworkers.
No comments:
Post a Comment