40-year free market fairytale exposed, as public ownership returns centre stage

by Ken Ferguson

• Leave aside the panicky Saturday recall of parliament amidst a welter of sub Churchillian guff about the ‘national interest’.

The real story in the supposedly historic debate was not about saving steel in Scunthorpe but desperately watching the 40 year dominance off the myth of the free market collapse.

On all sides from the far right Reform through the opportunist Tories, Liberals and SNP to the fraudulently claimed ‘workers’ Labour Party the chamber was filled with politicians watching their certainties evaporate.

From its historic roots in Pinochet’s Chile through the long dismal years of Thatcherism the poisonous prescription was relentlessly presented as the only available way to run an economy, epitomised by Thatcher’s infamous TINA — There Is No Alternative.

As in Chile, so in Thatcher’s Britain, repression backed up by a Goebbels-like propaganda drive, eagerly supported by papers like The Sun, Mail and Telegraph who in turn set the tone for the BBC and ITV pumped out the message

Miners’ strike
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this repression was the great miners strike but many thousands of others felt the lash as factories closed and thousands faced unemployment.

The rapid fall in union organisation and membership aided by Tory anti-union laws — left untouched by Labour through the Blair/Brown years — was a major factor speeding this process.

The 40 year reign saw the near destruction of Britain’s manufacturing industry replaced by the rule of speculators, financiers and of course the not so hidden hand of the shadowy ‘markets’.

What the cheerleaders for this madness carefully omitted was the corrosive social destruction that accompanied this reshaping of an entire country in the interests of a wealthy, well connected minority.

How this has shaped the world of today with its economic uncertainty, disillusion and belief that nothing works and politicians are just self seekers can best be illustrated with a few current examples:

• An NHS crippled by payments to financiers for PFI hospitals which would shame a back street moneylender.
• Rip-off prices for energy from firms once publicly owned as service now a giant pigs trough of super profits.
• A shipbuilding industry so reduced in capacity that new ferries have to be built in Turkey, this in an island!
• Bus services with ever increasing fares and ever diminishing services courtesy of private profiteers who put public service well down the list of priorities.
• Failure to grasp the vast opportunities presented by the development of green energy as equipment is imported across the world past the slipways if Scottish yards.
• A supposed Labour government so desperate for economic growth that it bases it on the production of weapons of ever greater sophistication to kill fellow humans.

These are just a few examples of what is now a grossly unequal country with crumbling public services beset by failures to care for the sick, build houses for the tens of thousands at the mercy of private landlords or organise basic services. Then enter arch disrupter, Donald J Trump.

Despite the furore which has seen the shares of capitalist behemoths such as Tesla and Apple suffer huge losses and the subsequent concessions to the moneylenders — exempting I phones made in China the most recent — the Trump course is clear and it is a knife at the throat of globalism.

Headless chickens in face of chaos
Imprisoned as they are in a comfortable cage bounded by the green benches of Westminster and the plush boardrooms of the City of London, the honourable ladies and gentlemen react like headless chickens in the face of the economic and military consequences of Trumpism.

Much of what has emerged off this response is a triumph of style over substance on an epic scale.

On steel we are now supposed to believe that saving Scunthorpe was based on saving the workers jobs and ensuring we can remain (are we?) an industrial power and that there is agreement on this ranging from Reform to Labour.

Voice readers will not be surprised to learn that life long globalisers and career politicians can easily stand on their heads and denounce what was yesterday an article of faith by which they lived.

In turn however this might raise a question on where these guardians of the national industrial base were through the last forty years of cuts and closures which shuttered the likes of Ravenscraig, Linwood, shipbuilding in Dundee, Aberdeen, Leith, Greenock, etc., when they spun the yarn that we can always buy such things elsewhere.

Hence the scurrying, like the three blind mice, to either salvage globalisation or cobble together an economic alternative, both formidable challenges.

Perhaps even more absurd is the reaction to the military challenges resulting from Trump’s clear intention to move to a mainly transactional military policy focused largely on China and leaving Europe to its own devices.

This has resulted in feverish arms race reminiscent of world running up the great imperialist slaughter of 1914-18 paid for by slashing aid to the world’s poor, freezing pensioners and casting thousands of kids into poverty.

However the most absurd aspect must be the pseudo military posturing of Starmer’s Coalition of the Willing to contain Russia in Ukraine. This with an army with hardly any soldiers, a navy with few ships and a rented US nuclear supposed deterrent.

Such posing which apes Churchill in 1940 really is a version of bread and circuses only made more reprehensible by the ever mounting death total in the all too real war in Ukraine.

Of course this kaleidoscope of chaos slicing through the central case in favour of globalisation held by all the major parties, dismissing alternatives, gives a grim satisfaction to those who opposed it.

However rather than the path taken by Starmer which is to fawn on Trump, play the royal card and tip toe around the horrors flowing from the White House what is needed is not just a break with this approach but an entirely new path.

Labour nationalisation policy crack
As the financiers pile up the cash, the planet burns, poverty soars and millions face uncertainty, war and potential death.

In this gloomy scene, the fact that Labour has been dragged kicking and screaming into public ownership at Scunthorpe opens a policy crack that now must be vigorously forced open by mass action.

Only public ownership will allow the enormous changes that will ensure economic security, decent housing, real climate action and the urgent renewal of our public services.

When Engels wrote of the choice being between socialism or barbarism, he hadn’t seen Trump but his tenancy of the White House makes taking the path leading to people and planet policies the urgent need of the hour.

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