Sorry, I just deleted a couple of genuine comments by mistake.

The Royal Bank of Scotland’s loans to Kraft Foods of the USA, to finance the purchase of the British chocolate company Cadbury,  raises all sorts of issues about national identity and the role of the nation state.  Kraft raised billions of pounds for its £11.5 billion acquisition of Cadbury, from the Royal Bank of Scotland and other supportive financial institutions. The money talked so loud that Cadbury’s shareholders voted for the deal. The Royal Bank of Scotland, let us remember, is 84% owned by the UK government.

Kraft lost no time in announcing job losses at Cadbury. The Somerdale factory at Keynsham, Bristol, is to close, resulting in 400 lost jobs. The work is transferring to Poland. True, Cadbury was itself planning to to stop production at Somerdale, but workers hoped that Kraft would — as business secretary Peter Mandelson had apparently pleaded — protect British jobs.

The migration of jobs to lower-cost locations is all too familiar now, an inevitable consequence of our global capitalism in which certain corporations have become more powerful than the elected governments of nation states, through methods that include the ‘revolving door’ for senior personnel, who move between business and government and back again.  The development of global busno-politico networks threatens to make the views of national populations almost irrelevant. How many British taxpayers would have supported Royal Bank of Scotland in its venture to aid Kraft take control of Cadbury, which was an iconic British brand, founded by a Quaker family for whom social justice was crucial? After all, the UK government owns Royal Bank of Scotland on behalf of the UK population, doesn’t it? For me, the fact that a bank controlled by the UK government can lend what is in effect our money to a company that is destroying our jobs poses a big question: who exactly is government working for?

It seems to me that we have lost control over our national life. If we are to feed ourselves adequately in future, to return to the theme of ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’, that control needs to be regained. To a great extent, a government’s freedom to act in the interests of its own citizens has been circumscribed by the free-trade rules of the World Trade Organisation. Who, exactly, benefits from the World Trade Organisation? Your answers, please.