Ashes to ashes (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Sometime very early in the morning of 24 June 2016, I woke up, as middle-aged men tend to do. I looked at my phone to see the result. My only thought was: “Fuck, that’s a lot of work.” Then I went back to sleep.
And a lot of work it proved to be. The EU is a profoundly undemocratic form of government, which is why I had voted to leave it. Seeing the result for the first time, I knew that the very principle of British political equality would now be on the line, because no referendum against the EU had ever previously been acted upon. I also knew that very few of my professional caste (academics) would fall in with the majority view, and help to make sure that Brexit was implemented, or even that it was properly understood.
Worse still, I had read Christopher Bickerton’s magisterial European Integration: From Nation States to Member States. As a result, I knew that the Eurosceptics, who had just won the referendum, did not understand the EU at all. The institution was not, as many Leave campaigners presented it, a foreign superstate that ruled over Britain; it was the way in which the British political, business and professional elites ruled over Britain. It was British ministers and civil servants who made law and policy in the EU, in collaboration with the politicians and bureaucrats of other member states.
The failure to recognise this meant that the Eurosceptics did not understand the process they had set in motion, and that Brexit was unlikely to go well — a fact confirmed by Boris Johnson’s and Michael Gove’s infamous rabbits-in-the-headlights press conference later that day. The Eurosceptics had pretended their chief enemy was in Brussels when in truth it was at home, as we were all about to find out.
Another and bigger problem for me was that while I knew what I had voted against the day before, I was a lot less sure about what I had voted for. I could, of course, have said that I had voted for a stronger democracy. In fact, I did say it. But that didn’t really answer the question.
It’s certainly true that in the EU, politicians and civil servants of its member-states collaborate behind the closed doors of international diplomacy, cooking up laws that are adopted without reference to national legislatures. The whole system is backed up by treaties that allow capital and labour to shift around at will, out of the control of particular nations or of their pesky electorates. If a particular consequence of this was unpopular — such as, say, mass migration — then “Europe” could be blamed.
The essence of the EU is this evasion of political responsibility within its member states, which explains why Britain’s political system has become so sclerotic and dysfunctional. It is an evasion that depends on a centrist oligopoly of dominant political parties, able to take their domestic constituencies for granted. But in 2016, the question remained: in voting against this system and for national sovereignty, how would our democracy be strengthened? What did national sovereignty even mean?
For Eurosceptics, national sovereignty meant escaping the clutches of the Brussels bureaucracy, and returning the ultimate law-making power to our sovereign parliament. But, if the true heart of member-statehood is the evasion of political accountability at home, then the underlying problem was still going to be with us, in or out of the EU. That problem is a political class which is much more comfortable hobnobbing with the cosmopolitan elites of other states in intergovernmental forums, and finding its policy cues there, than it is with the less glamorous process of actually representing their citizens. How was national sovereignty going to solve this problem?
So I did some study. I wrote articles. I joined a network. Brexit itself has been an excellent teacher — in both its successes and its failures.
Over the past seven years, militant Remainers have continued to demand to know what the advantages of Brexit are. They are naturally blind to its chief benefit: that the demand of a majority of the electorate for national sovereignty has revealed the political void at the heart of the British state. With Brexit, the electorate bowled balls that none of the major players in the political class have been able to play. All have been stumped, humiliated.
First, the Labour Party paid the price for its unwillingness to respect the political equality of its poorest voters. After 2019, Labour’s century-old one-party states in the “Red Wall” are gone. They may win most of these seats back at the next election, but they will never be secure again. Complacency is no longer an option.
The Tories were next. They had a clear mandate to level up and to invest in deprived regions. They did neither. Instead, the pandemic hit and they trailed along with a globally inspired, technocratic suspension of civil liberties, imposing draconian rules that they chose to ignore while being unable to keep their hypocrisy secret. After Johnson was caught out, they next indulged the extraordinary farce of the Liz Truss government before retreating back to a centrist in Rishi Sunak. Bereft of new ideas, they blew a massive parliamentary majority managing to alienate both their 2019 gains from Labour in the North and their wealthier, more Europhile core in the South.
The SNP has now followed the Tories, its ersatz “independence” project falling into disarray once the security blanket of the UK’s single market membership was taken away. With the UK out of the EU, Scottish independence is just too demanding a prospect for the culture warriors in Holyrood who have survived its corruption chaos.
On the face of it, both the SNP and the Tories have been disgraced by petty scandals and poorly handled policy choices, rather than Brexit. But what makes the minor scandals so damaging — not just for the individual leaders involved, but for the parties themselves — is those parties’ fundamental inability to deliver on the policies at the core of their mandates in the wake of Brexit.
In this we can see the first lesson of 2016: there is no way back to national sovereignty. The old parties and their traditions are zombies, stumbling around without knowing that the political life has drained out of them. They are incapable of making anything of parliament’s restored legal sovereignty. Indeed, the reason they died is that they ceased to make any plausible claim to represent the nation (British or Scottish). As long as we were in the EU, they could carry on pretending and so could we, but Brexit has exposed their exhaustion. It was the first step on the road forward to national sovereignty, a clearing of the ground for a new project: the project of nation-building.
Brexit has illustrated how true sovereignty always required more than the Eurosceptics’ call for the legal supremacy of a sovereign parliament within the territory it rules. As Martin Loughlin, Britain’s leading constitutional theorist, has long argued, parliament’s legal supremacy is worth little if it is not underpinned by a relationship of political authority between the rulers and the ruled. For politics to function, in other words, voters must believe that parliament, and the government that is answerable to it, really represents us, so that we recognise its laws as our laws. And it is this which generates the real power of government to get anything useful done. Yet today, those with eyes to see — and that’s now most of us — know that our major parties can no longer sustain this kind of authority.
If Brexit has made the void of political authority inescapably apparent, merely leaving the EU has not done much to fill it. Without new politics and a new electoral system, our clapped-out political parties will continue to find their policies in the forums of the cosmopolitan elites: Net Zero, mass migration, identity politics, information control, proxy war. They will limp along offering nothing too innovative: more green austerity, more culture wars, more censorship. They will stay close to the Single Market, relying on the strictures of the Northern Ireland Protocol, rather than trying to conjure up something new.
For a little while, our first-past-the-post system will keep this rickety show on the road, but it will not be strong. Labour will probably take power next year on a reduced turnout and be widely loathed within months. There may be talk of the national interest, but it will take the form of a warmed-up repackaging of the de-risking element of Joe Biden’s new global cold war. It certainly will not be a claim based on representing the needs of voters conceived of as citizens of a nation-state, engaged together in the task of self-government.
And so, after Brexit, the British state is in the strange condition of being neither member-state nor nation-state. It is a new kind of contradictory entity — a post-member-state. In Taking Control, my co-authors and I argue that Brexit has posed the need for a new politics of national sovereignty understood in Loughlin’s political sense; as a question of developing the relations of trust and authority that come from effective political representation. Once we take this nation-building perspective, novel solutions to the familiar problems of our age will surely arise.
For at its heart, such nation-building is a process of investment in the nation’s people and in the infrastructure, both economic and political, that we need to rule ourselves. It allows us to identify the real obstacles in our domestic constitution to the revival of our collective public life, emphasising equal citizenship over narcissistic identity and ethnic or religious divides. And, crucially, nation-building is inherently internationalist — as opposed to cosmopolitan and intergovernmental. After all, respecting one’s national sovereignty includes, and even depends on, that of others’. Far from being isolationist, then, Brexit remains a huge opportunity to break free from the decaying structures of globalism and Atlanticism, and instead to make friends not only with the restive peoples of Europe, but also with the rising powers of the Global South.
On the seventh anniversary of that great ballot box rebellion, the mainstream of British politics presents a terminally sad spectacle: obsessing over the foolish misdemeanours of failed leaders, while the government-in-waiting confirms its willingness simply to go back to following EU rules, only now without any say in the making of them. What few seem able to imagine is what was still obscure to me when I momentarily regretted being on the winning side that morning in 2016. The majority of voters were demanding that they too were represented at the feast. In so doing, they laid the basis for a new project of national sovereignty. It is by its nature a most invigorating project — if we are willing to embrace it.
Peter Ramsay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and the co-author of Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit.
peteray21 
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SubscribeNot a word out of place.
Yes. An extremely impressive essay with a core message applicable to the UK and the US.
Yes… and no.
I’m in agreement with most of the piece but i disagree that ‘there’s no longer a nation’ (my quote). I very strongly believe there is.
Go to the shires, escape the urban bubbles, and that nation very much still exists. For sure, it has been diminished but like the blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, the burning desire to be productive on behalf of the nation remains. He’s absolutely right that we have to find a way – our way – of reviving ourselves to become more fully productive, and our politicians much more responsive to the electorate – whom they’re intended to serve. How this unfolds will be fascinating, and not without convolutions; but the process has begun.
It’s curious that there is no mention of the fact that before Brexit the EU did not actually allow us to pursue our national interest; the European interest trumped the national interest. Of course, most European countries ignored the rules and found ways to sell their infrastructure to their own internal entities, but the UK was always a “good European” and obeyed the rules scrupulously. It is a bit much to blame Keir Starmer when his predecessors have left him with very little national interest to protect!
Interesting. But the UK ” solving” global problems in India? Interfering rather via Soros backed busybodies and Islamist bureaucrats of their Deep States to introduce transgenderism and ” rainbow rights”, and a plethora of humbug laden discourse; instead of spending the money on the UK itself- especially in setting up industry for its domestic population.
Very true. One of the great stupidities of British foreign policy over the last 77 years has been to side with Pakistan and ISI against India.
I have been researching the reasons for an upcoming book; and my preliminary conclusions donot exhibit the traditional UK elites in very good light; all the more curious as Nehru seemed to have depended on MI 5 well into the early 1960s.
Totally agree. Soros fled Hungary in 1956 and attended LSE, pity he did not leave. Another example of theLSE, damaging India. Laski had done more damage to India in the 20th century than anyone else.
Good bit in that can agree with especially the failure of privatisation of utilities and the acquisition of so many of our best companies by foreign buyers. But as is usually the case here on Unherd the Author uses the recent story to take a few too many narrative leaps to underpin a political bias. That makes it a less serious piece than it could have been and more a bit of propaganda.
Firstly much is being made of the failure to support the potential Cumbria coalmine if UK needs coking coal for Scunthorpe. The tribalists fail to mention the coal to be mined there would have too much sulphur content to be of use in the blast furnace. In fact the biggest thing would be more stable Gas prices yet here the UK is subject to the fluctuations in international Gas price market. Weaning ourselves off such a degree of reliance actually would help businesses such as Steel. Author also fails to mention the strategy seems to be for Govt to buy time until electric arc furnaces are ready. Scunthorpe is old technology, but we needed some UK production and the proportion generated ‘in country’ in Europe significantly higher than UK. That’s a failure in industrial strategy going back much more than Starmer’s 9 months in office.
And then the predictable jump to Brexit and it being in our National interest. Well firstly let’s remember we didn’t join the Euro so this idea we had 30yrs of rolling over not quite the case. We had numerous other key vetos where UK had dug in and extracted exclusions. Tories and the Right generally never mentioned bringing Steel back into UK ownership as one of the freedom benefits did they. Farage just seen which way the wind is blowing and jumped on board. The notion now that bobbing around mid Atlantic blown this way and that is a better position than being attached to a stronger alliance highly debatable. We’ll see how it plays out in near future thanks to the Orange One. And of course we’ll see which way Reform lean especially if the zeitgeist is heading back towards taking back UK ownership (private or public) many industries. Some alignment I suspect coming on pension industry reform to support more internal British investment hopefully if we can just be serious thinkers for a short while.
The tribalists fail to mention the coal to be mined there would have too much sulphur content to be of use in the blast furnace
… according to one paper, not peer-reviewed, put together by someone who hadn’t tested the coal, but relied on general regional surveys :
“Their “evidence” for this claim is a report paid for by SLACC. A protest group set up to fight against the mine. The report was given to a single student at Edinburgh University to put together. It did not test the coal, it simply looked at coal in general in the North.”
Scunthorpe furnaces are contemporary tech, until a viable successor technology is developed. That is yet to happen.
The EU a stronger alliance? Possibly you haven’t read about the current state of Germany…
Better late than never. Starmer may be coming to his senses. Let’s hope we hear no more about declaring war on a nuclear power without US backing, when we have two weeks supply of ammunition and the prospect of no steel works with which to re-arm.
Thanks to Philip Cunliffe for a great article. The article states that “success was measured by … how much foreign investment it could attract”. Foreign investment takes two forms: (1) a foreign company chooses to locate some of its productive activity in the UK and (2) foreign cowboys buy an existing UK company to asset-strip it, whilst using its reputation to borrow money. Instead of describing the second category as “foreign investment”, I suggest that we use the more technical terminology “taking the pi55”.
I liked “China produced the steel, we produced slide decks on how to ensure your supply chains were gender compliant.”
The measurement of foreign investment carefully avoids any distinction between inward investment to create new productive capacity and simply buying existing assets. The latter has increasingly dominated, not least because we need it to help offset the trade deficit. It is, of course, a finite process.
A country without a capital, army or language.
“The national interest has been conspicuous by its absence from British politics for years if not decades.”
Indeed, not since the Falklands, and much of the blame for this must lie with the simply appalling Tory* party and its despicable charlatans, Major, Hesseltine, Cameron, Hague and May to name but a very few.
The only glimmer of hope came when the despised demos defied the treacherous ‘establishment’ and voted for Brexit, but only to see it sabotaged/denied by the Covid Scamdemic.
Thus what is left is but a hollowed out husk of a once great nation. Besides the despoiling and destruction of our industry what is left of our once great institutions, Parliament, the Judiciary, the Church(es), the Monarchy and so on? Sadly very little, ALL, without exception have degenerated to a greater or lesser extent, and this is entirely due to to the antics of the worthless muppets who rule us.
Consummatum est.
*Labour are NOT blameless, but that is only to be expected.
Before this. After 1945 those running Britain did not understand that trade is competition and we needed to move from the vast majority of people working in low paid un and semi skilled work into skilled well paid work. Those who understood this issue either worked overseas for British companies such as Shell, BP or emigrated .
After Suez in 1956 the FO had nervous breakdown and a Europhile group with the backing of Heath decided to enter the EEC at all costs, even if it meant sacrificing our fishing and sovereignty .
Cancellation of TRS2;the ending of grammar schools;university scholarships, expansion of arts degrees , Cousins a communist leaderof the TGWU, the ending of evening in degre level education at polytechnics inEngineering and Applied Science n and the communist Jack Jones, a civil servicewhose selection was biased towards art degrees and against engineering alldestroyed our lead in engineering such as aeronautical engineering.
In 1939 Britain produced he most brilliant aeronautical and mechanical engineers in the World – Camm, J Smith , JR Mitchell, Chadwick,de Havilland, Whittle, Stanley Hooker, Hives, B Wallis, all a product ofgrammar schools and rigorous mathematical education from a young age. Hooker designed the Supercharge for the Merlinover a couple of nights using a pencil and the back of income tax envelopes-that is genius. The comprehensive system has failed to produce such talent.
The Great Inventor
Stanley Hooker Legendary Rolls Royce & Bristol Engineer
Having lived through most of that I must wholeheartedly agree!
How did we let it happen? Were we not paying attention?
Simple.
The landowners developed contempt for trade and technology in second half of 19th century aided by Arnold of Rugby following a classical rather than technical education- compare with Bismarck’s Blood and Iron.
The agricultural decline post 1870 resulted in landowners entering the City, not industry and many of our best engineers developed railways, mines etc over seas.
The domination of middle class leftwingers of universities particularly Oxford post mid 1930s ( marmalade and manners ) which provided much of the A Stream Civil Service and politicians ( PPE degrees – Wilson) adopted the contempt for trdae and technology. Many of the children of factory owners post 1930s read arts degrees, not engineering and went into non industrial jobs. cahrles Northcote Parkinson explains this in his books – Parkinson’s Law and also Arnold Toynebee( resting on our oars was his phrase and John Glubb – End of Empires. From 1940s skilled craftsmen, foreman, engineers and scientists went overseas for better pay and power taxes. A mine electrician or railway mechanic ( completed 5 year apprenticeship and 1 year post apprenticeship training to become a master /journeyman ) could go overseas and within a year was a Foreman living in detached house with swimming pool.
My suspicion is that with the 80 or so civil servants forced to take retirement in mid 1950s due to communist sympathies; how many trashed British industry , for example cancellation of TRS2 and destruction of aircraft industry ?
BBC4 – Jet ! When Britain ruled the Sky (Extract)
Ah! The views of Martin J Wiener…English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit…plausible certainly but not necessarily right.
In any event, the creation and expansion of empire and the development of an Industrial nation are different and not interdependent.
The Empire provided a market. Many of our innovative and adventurous spirits went overseas. Yeast may only be 2% of the weight of a loaf but one only has to reduce it a small amount and the bread does not rise ;whereas one can change the mount of flour far more without much impact.
From the time of Newton, about 50 -75 people created our Industrial Revolution from 1660s to 1950s. For a start, Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Newcomen, Brindley, A Darby, Wilkinson, Watt and Boult, Wedgewood, Arkwright, G Stephenson, Priestly, Faraday. These people gives as modern physics, steam engine,cheap coal, cheap iron, cheap goods, electricity and railways without which there can be no Industrial Revolution. J Burke in his connections and The Day the Universe Changed explains technical innovation very well.Post 1850s many of our engineers were developing railways, coal mines,iron works,dams, harbours, irrigation projects, etc over seas for example S America,USA, Canada, Australia Japan, Ukraine, India, Africa and post 1870 much British capitalwas invested in S and N America , not improving our industries.
In the obituary of Heith Dewhurst he states that his Father’s factory still used steam to power belts and his father could not see how it could be improved . ” Is it any wonder the N of England was finished industrially ?”. japanese visited the textile mills in the 190s and realise how they couldinrease productivity.
We expanded the Welfare State and humanities education which could have been spent TRS2 which would have developed technology in general. We spent money on Concorde rather than swing technology developed by Wallis which enabled planes to take off at about 100mph and then reach supersonic speeds over the oceans.
Strikes led by shop stewards of the un and semi skilled unions ( TGWU, NUR, NUM, ) persuaded craftsmen and foremen to move overseas.
Whilst the TSR2 is frequently touted as a “lost opportunity” it was far too expensive and the only market was the RAF. There was no potential export market to ameliorate the costs. The decision to cancel was correct.
Compare and contrast the McDonnell Douglas Phantom, a simply brilliant “all round” combat aeroplane which sold well to many countries, including Britain.
But the F111 was a heap of junk, and again Britain was right to cancel the purchase contract, the problem being the very heavy penalty costs.
Free trade is usually promoted most by those with the biggest existing comparative advantage. The Empire was obviously keen on this, but within the Empire itself exported manufactured goods and controlled the extraction of raw materials. So, it wasn’t really free trade. The US dismantled this with its insistence on full sterling convertibility as a condition for its last war loans. The UK lost its protection and accelerated the relative economic decline that it had started in the late 19th century and had been helped on its way by the two world wars.
I agree with your description of decline from the late 19th century.
The Empire only takes shape post 1850, prior to that we were selling around the world. The main failure in Britain was the inability to improve the maths skills post 1850. Much civil and mechanical engineering can be done on simple area, volume, temperature calculations and trial and error. Marc Brunel sent his son Isambard to Paris to learn the mathematics required for more advanced engineering.
Germany started it’s industrialisation in chemical engineering in the 1850s where reactions involve volatile compounds at pressures many times that of atmospheric and temperatures of 100s Centigrade. consequently calculations must be correct to prevent fire and explosion.
Imperial College was founded because Britain was falling behind Germany, especially in chemistry. Post 1870s much of British capital was invested overseas and this is where many of best engineers went.
Even as late as the 1980s I can remember elderly ladies criticising someone because they were in trade. Charles Northcote Parkinson attacks this attitude in his books of the late 1950s. If one look at the increase in undergraduates since 1945 the vast majority are useless arts subjects, (if they had been classical and modern languages geared to business they would be of use) , not applied science and engineering needed for advanced manufcaturing.
The classic bait and switch. The article begins as a reasonable critique of British economic policy in recent decades before descending into a swivel eyed rant about sovereignty. Globalisation is not going any where. We are not going to be re-importing manufacturing from China and textile production from SE Asia. It always makes me laugh when people criticise discourse about identity in one breath before lauding some vision of Britishness that never existed in their next. Time runs forwards not backwards.
Nobody is saying we need to bring back button-making machines. What people are asking genuinely is that some industries should never be sold to countries outside of their own. This is basic human development.
Every human being needs safety and security first. Without that, there’s no self-actualization, no love, no creativity. What globalization got wrong is that it outsourced safety and security. These foundational needs were placed outside the country. We are also subsiding all lack of safety and security aboard to keep up the charade! To sort of keep people like you that you are safe cause all wars happen there but you are paying for it!
Now people are waking up. You probably have a PhD built on a house of cards. A PhD that never taught you how to question the foundations, only how to repeat what you were taught. You never asked why.
So let me tell you what nationalism really means: home.
You live where you work.
You eat what you grow
And no, you cannot globalize that.
Sure, clothes can be globalized. If someone wants to buy clothes made overseas, that’s fine. You can also support local brands. Clothes aren’t essential every day. But you know what can’t be globalized?
Where people need to work.
Where people need to grow food.
Where people need to make their own medicine.
Those are the industries that build a stable nation. Without them, everything else is just decoration.
Nice hobbit fantasy.
Absolutely brilliant. And it can be done.
Scathing sarcasm at its best. Nothing to nitpick here. Reviving the British identity is a project in its self. I could suggest a horrible-sounding Doge-like project for reinvirogating the national spirit as a start.
A superb article. This country needs to ensure it can provide for itself. If achieving this causes a loss to the bottom line of a foreign corporation this shouldn’t cause our leaders to lose a moments sleep. It’s not protectionist to look out for your own safety. You don’t label a person a hermit because they can wipe their own arse.
This is one of the best articles I’ve read. Now we’re finally talking. Until we name the problem for what it is, we cannot solve it. Yes, the two major parties fight over whether to keep the last standing steel production in our own country. And tomorrow? We’ll hear that Gmail has been bought by China and we won’t even have access to our own emails. Do you see where I’m going with this?
We’re finally talking about the real issue. And all those flags you see on the streets—that’s part of the distraction: the transgender flag, the LGBTQ+ flag, the DEI branding, the global flags from every country. People are given the idea that displaying all these flags is a symbol of something important. But it’s just a distraction and part of the global there is global here.
Because the moment people start thinking about where they are and who they are, they stop thinking about flags. Why? Because there would be no war there. The only reason there’s a war “down there” is because that’s where our money is going. If no money goes there, there is no war. And without that money, the flags would disappear instantly. They only exist as long as globalization funds conflicts.
So don’t worry about the flags. The minute we have a real leader who tells with conviction to the people: This is your home. Don’t destroy it and there is a money to start your own business (if we can give money to other countries under fake premises of human rights and blahh what is the shame of money given to our own people to keep business here?). We must come together, and we’re not sending another dollar to war—we’re investing in education, health, and infrastructure, everything changes! If not instantly, then definitely strategically and longer term.
People won’t need those flags anymore. Because those flags are just like everything else of all gender and virtual signaling-symbols used to keep us distracted from what really matters – innovation at home!
That’s so not going to happen!
But I can remember right back to 1969 when the Buy British Campaign was an utter failure despite being fronted by the charismatic figure of Max By graves. If it didn’t work then it’s not going to now. Even if Ed Sheeran urges us to.A high proportion of our 19th century business success was due to us owning a huge share of the market. We MADE our Colonies and nations like India buy OUR manufactures from cotton cloth to railway engines. We made it illegal and a crime for them to manufacture their own. Now the rest of the world has a choice and they CHOOSE not to buy from us. Mr Trump has got the same problem but he seems inclined to solve it at the point of a gun. Oh dear.
Correlli Barnett’s figures contradict your premise. In 1913 India was nearly equaled as a market for British products by France and Germany combined. They weren’t forced to “buy British”.
Britain also had extensive interests in South America eg Argentina, also not forced to buy British.
Certainly many British products in the 1960s and 70s were inferior hence the loss of markets including the home market. The causes are many…and lack of hard work and commercial nous figure strongly. But until recently the motor industry in Britain was performing well…foreign owned and managed which speaks volumes. The Nissan Qashqai was the best selling car in Britain last year…built in Sunderland (incidentally a factory established under the auspices of the “industry destroying” Margaret Thatcher…)
No doubt something CAN be done but to what extent, and with what success, is uncertain.
Of course Britain has a long record of allowing in products produced by cheap labour and under less stringent regulation which hardly helps. Britain outlawed slavery but allowed the import and sale of Brazilian sugar…produced by slave labour.
What is ignored is under skilling of middle management. Germany and Switzerland train people to 1 or 2 levels above which they operate. Britain does not , so middle management fearful of the advances in technology they did not understand, turned down innovation.
What is funny is the British aristocracy favoured innovation from Tudor times until about 1850. Duke of Bridgewater supported J Brindley to build his canal against the comments of professionals; Wellington supported Thoms Telford.
As B Wallis said ” I have achived everything in spite of he professionals not because of them. ” it was the aristiocracy who created the Agricultural Revolution, without which the Industrial could not have occurred.
East India Company, Royal Institute and Royal Society were supported and patronised by the aristocracy. It has been the left wing middle class intellectual who have despised trade and technology since the 1930s which have been the problem .
“yet it is they who privatised British Steel to begin with. “
TO BEGIN WITH ?!
British Steel was a postwar Labour creation, not some natural timeless entity.
Before the Iron and Steel Act 1949, private industry produced our steel.
“This global compact came with the added bonus that it allowed us to substitute dirty blue-collar jobs (and people) with nice white-collar jobs”
Actually, what too often substituted for blue-collar jobs was Welfare.
I was basically the wrong colour,” she says wryly. “It’s not just English people, but second- and third- generation Asian and black families that are fed up and want to leave. I don’t want to sound awful, but it’s just not England around here anymore.”
The problem is that the sense that ‘it’s just not England around here anymore.” is felt and recognised by all except adherents of Davos, their industrial clients and grievance insectionalists. To them, white ethnic ‘communities’ don’t exist and can’t be allowed.
It’s only Starsimer and his acolytes that believe their characterisation of the white ethnic caste as racist, fascist, extreme right wing. This is how they deny existence of white ethnicities because, if they didn’t, there would be justifiable tension between the largest community and the minnows, guess who’d win?
A further fundamental problem is the toolmaker’s son’s Stalinist repression of free speech and waging of identitarian war against the white ethnic majority. Clearly exemplified by crass pre-sentencing reports for non-white, non-Judeo/Christians, terrorising of parents on Whatswhapp group chat, imprisoning of petulant Southport Xtweets, NCHI harassment of Essex Telegraph journalists. And of course the US interest in the recent Dr Bolt abortion clinic case is the latest tyranny, which lends credibility to those claiming the characterisation of Tommy Robinson as a political prisoner……
What we have here is the slow and inevitable societal collapse that has been happening for decades with failures in globalisation, replacement (and plantation) , multiculturalism, DEI, Alice-in-Wonderlandism prizes for all, of the liberal progressives.
Their response ? A spur line from Barking to what will undoubtably become a carbon copy of Battersea? , Er, no, rather more like Thamesmead that utopian film set of Clockwork Orange.
Do I hear the sound of a canary squeaking a warning in the (metaphorical) mine shaft?
Is anyone listening?