Fat Git wrote:dookus wrote:
In general, no they weren't. There would have been no reason to subsidise the crap out of them if they were profitable. British Coal, owned by the taxpayer, was losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
Well, according to many reports, they were, and the taxpayer is bailing out banks every 5 minutes, when do we let them shut down?
I'd like to see these many reports. If they were profitable, why did they rely so heavily on state support to stay afloat?
Of course, we should be letting unprofitable banks shut down, but a little something called 'the systemic failure of the banking system' tends to make governments wary of doing things that inadvertantly end up so that nobody can get paid. Poncey's made a good post about this over in the Off-Topic forum on Brown's 1997 deregulation and how it led to our being held hostage by the financial sector.
Do you know anything about this?
In China - for example - a city in the textile belt in Jiangsu - that town has always existed, they build a factory there and some of the people stop farming and become textile workers. Take away the textile factories, that town isn't going to die off, people will stay there and go back to what they did before, and certainly nobody is going to migrate there.
Now, because this is where the industrial revolution started, towns were built around industry
take Burnley for example, before the industrial revolution, the population was 1500 - 200 years
later - the population was 110000, that is because people flocked from all over the country
to work there. So if you take the industry away, you kill the town. In very few countries, that happened - the Soviets did it - built towns in Siberia where they made a certain product - and guess what? The town died when they stopped making the product. The UK, the Soviet Union - I can't think of many others to be honest.
Most of our industrial cities started out extremely small and grew up quickly because of the growth of industry, but there are plenty of decent-sized towns here that the Industrial Revolution didn't dominate (for example, Norwich and York) and as such have remained in decent prospects despite their own industries dwindling. Leeds is a good example of an industrial town that has managed to reinvent itself since deindustrialisation rather than dying on its arse as soon the industry disappeared. In any case, you could say the same in terms of spectacular population growth and dependence on industry for the majority of industrial cities worldwide - the fact that the Industrial Revolution happened here first doesn't make our circumstances unique.
The phenomena of 'company towns' has also happened all over the US (mostly in the 'rust belt'), and this is affecting the north of Japan as their heavy industries start to lose their mass employment of the last few decades. Anywhere that you have a dominant employer that pulls out of a relatively small community, the same situation occurs - this is not something that is unique to the UK. As for Chinese cities that are growing massively because of an influx of workers to fill these new industries there - how do we know what they'd do if the industries disappeared tomorrow? They've yet to deindustrialise. The idea that if all of their major factories pulled out they'd all just go back to tilling the rice paddies in their millions seems pretty unrealistic to me.
No it wasn't, it's a central tenet of EU law that EU nationals are allowed to move around member nations freely. If you think leaving the EU to get around this would be a way of avoiding wages being cut, that's another argument. But now that capital and information are so easy to move around, it's pretty hard to escape basic economics - that someone who can do what you can do for less money and under worse conditions is going to get your work unless there some aspect you can do better. We've been having our arses kicked in this respect since at least the 70s by the Far East because of this. Thatcher did not create globalism, and trying to pretend it didn't exist by borrowing massive amounts of money to cushion those who would otherwise lose money because of it nearly led to our going bankrupt in the 70s.
Fat Git wrote:She got the cheapest product and sold the 'family silver' that isn't competing with the Far East, shutting down and selling off ALL your industry to buy their shite. That was the plan was it? Buy coal from the Colombians who paid their child miners 15p an hour? Short term economic exploitation which has now got us a country with dire social problems, we make nothing, expensive housing and people can't get on the housing ladder, communities in terminal decline - well done Maggie!
It's a more sustainable plan than losing hundreds of millions pounds a year to prop up an industry that would not reform. It's a considerably less sustainable plan than trying to reform the industry without the aid of jackbooted policemen. I would argue that a country with a less inset culture of naked self-interest would have reached a more sensible compromise and closed the pits far less abruptly, perhaps even have made them profitable without the loss of tens of thousands of jobs (see, for example, how the Germans went from regularly having 9-10% unemployment through the 90s and early 2000s to their current massive exporter status; their unions agreed to wage freezes for the best part of a decade, something I cannot imagine Scargill's contemporaries ever agreeing to).
But that's what a rabid class war will do for the idea of co-operation.
As for us 'making nothing'; we still export half a trillion dollars worth of goods a year. Manufacturing still makes up a good 17% of GDP (more than, say, France, which subsidises a great deal of their industry). We're not finished yet on that front, not by a long shot. If we had continued to run industry the way we did in the 1970s, there really would be nothing left by now.
