The redundant steel worker wore a black armband. He was 58, he said, and would never find another job. He was one of 1,600 in Redcar, on Teesside in North East England, whose jobs have been axed by Corus, which since 2006 has been owned by the Tata Steel group of India. On Thursday evening this week I watched ‘Question Time’ on BBC TV, coming from Teesside, and felt that an impotent anger afflicted the audience. Teesside makes high quality steel, but the Redcar plant does not fit into Tata’s strategic plan.

The steel industry has been globalised. Who are the winners? The owners of Chinese factories making metal goods for sale around the world? The directors of the most aggressively profit-seeking steel companies? The bankers who lend them money? I cannot think of many other ‘winners’, but there are millions of losers. Just on Teesside, 1,600 lost jobs mean at least 2,250 or so more people affected in the immediate families of the redundant workers, on the basis of the national average 2.4 people in a household. So we have about 3,850 people directly affected. Then there are the enterprises that depended on the steel plant for their livelihoods. A typical multiplier in manufacturing is 2.35 or so. That would mean 3,760 consequential job losers, in turn affecting about 5,265 more people in their households,  an additional total of 9,025 persons experiencing the repercussions of the plant closure.

So the end of steel manufacture at plant employing 1,600 may well result in the economic impact of worklessness affecting, in a short time, the lives of 12,875 people.

We are told that our future as a nation depends on us offering a highly skilled workforce to the world. We are successful in weapons manufacture, but that is because  security and defence are the only industrial sectors exempt from the free trade — no quotas, no tariffs — mandated by the World Trade Organisation. It’s no surprise that the defence company BAE Systems is the UK’s largest manufacturing company, because BAE and similar defence (weapons) companies are exempt from the open competition rules.  This means that our economy, and jobs, become over-dependent on the arms business.

We have been conditioned to accept global free trade as both desirable and inevitable, but it is neither. It has proved to be an excellent method for transferring resources from the majority to a tiny minority of global super-rich. As a supposed democracy, we have the capacity to challenge the ‘common sense’ that unfettered free trade benefits peoples and nations. That ‘common sense’ was carefully constructed, and can be deconstructed given sufficient effort and will. A first step may be to elect politicians who will scale back the World Trade Organisation, to allow nations more control over their own economies.

The major political parties in the UK still accept subordination to the WTO, and thus acquiesce in the diminution of democracy that makes us into victims rather than active citizens. The steelworkers in Redcar understand only too well what it feels like to be economic victims, in a system that does not give them a voice.