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.

More Fraternité, urges Jacques

Jacques Monin, London correspondent for Radio France, has just published a book called Le naufrage britannique (The British Shipwreck). I’ve read the first two chapters, ‘L’argent roi’ (‘King Money’) and ‘La fin du rêve’ (‘The End of the Dream’) and am impressed by M. Monin’s analysis of the UK’s civic weaknesses. He covers similar ground to David Marquand in Decline of the Public, a book which castigates the retreat of civic values and of opportunities for debate and engagement, in the face of aggressive private enterprise and commercial values.

M. Monin has been startled by the extent of political apathy in the UK, and makes the point that the rare instances of labour unrest in recent years have had money at their heart – individuals fearing insufficient income or excessive costs. Ideas, or concepts of right and wrong, have largely ceased to concern the populace. He concedes that there was a wave of public opposition to the Iraq War back in 2003, but uses this as an example of the rarity of mass dissent on a political issue. The ascent of money as all that really matters has, he suggests, impoverished public debate because Britons have come to accept the hegemony of economics as natural, as common sense, impossible to question because they do not realise that it can be questioned.

Acceptance of a single dogma is, in a constantly changing natural and social world, a recipe for disastrous rigidity. Furthermore, a dogma that privileges the economy above every other consideration relegates all that makes us human to the periphery of existence.

The cold dawn of 2009, heralding financial hardship and a fall in our collective standard of living, reveals the nation state as very much the junior partner in global business, existing to provide business with workers to be paid as little as possible, and with consumers to buy goods and services for as much as possible. There is a fundamental contradiction here, of course, but one masked by government as income redistributor, through taxation and the use of measures such as tax credits to supplement individuals’ incomes.

Belatedly, it is becoming apparent that globalisation is a merciless master. Surely the nation state can seize back the intellectual initiative, to start to create a society in which citizens control economies, not the other way round. Have we become too apathetic to politics to start to devise new ways forward?

If you can understand French, do read the book. Le naufrage britannique, ISBN 978-2-7103-3104-9, is published by La Table Ronde in Paris and costs €20.

Gatwick Airport, a wet Thursday in late November, 2010.
Tim and Beryl Hall are shuffling towards Security, an hour and a half after arriving by coach, and an hour and a half before their flight to Malaga, on the Costa del Sol.

Tim: “Look Beryl what’s that commotion ahead?”
Beryl: “Heavens, police are trying to arrest a woman, she’s wearing a long grey raincoat.”
Tim: “I hope she’s not a suicide bomber.”
Beryl: “They’re leading her away, maybe she was trying to jump bail or something.”
Tim: “You’re never sure now are you, whether people who are arrested are really criminals, or just unlucky, or disliked by people in High Places, or have just made a mistake like filling in a form wrongly, or not filling in a form. Well it’s not us anyway.”
Beryl: “Pick up your bag, the queue’s moving again.”

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