Latest news with #TonyBenn
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Left-wing haters need a lesson in Thatcherism
Deputising for Charles Moore in these pages from time to time is more than enough to make my imposter syndrome run wild, but emulating him by writing a biography of Margaret Thatcher when he has already written a magnificent three volume one, is perhaps inevitably a step too far. Mine will be published on Thursday but is barely a pamphlet by comparison, and perhaps has a different objective. Its aim is twofold – to introduce her to a new generation, which wasn't alive when she was in power. It's astonishing to realise that, to have ever voted for Margaret Thatcher, you would have to be at least 54 years old. In the 35 years since her fall from power, so many myths have grown up about her that many younger Brits probably think she was responsible for the slaughter of the first born. There have been only three significant prime ministers since the war whose policies still impact the way we live today – Attlee, Thatcher and Blair. As Tony Benn would have put it, they were each signposts rather than weathervanes. But today's younger generations have been indoctrinated into believing that Margaret Thatcher was privileged and her policies were only ever aimed to benefit the rich. That's presumably why she oversaw the biggest transfer to the working classes in the history of our country – by which I mean the sale of council houses and encouraging ordinary people to buy shares in privatised companies. People believe she supported the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa because she didn't impose sanctions. In fact, she did more to bring Apartheid to an end than virtually anyone else, as our then Ambassador to South Africa, Robin Renwick, has detailed in his various books. Nelson Mandela personally thanked her for her role in getting him released and bringing the evils of that regime to an end. According to Left-wing haters, Thatcher did nothing for the environment. Yet it was she who was the head of government in the world to warn of the dangers of climate change in 1989 – before most people had ever heard of the term. If I was wanting to court controversy, I could also have said she closed down most of the coal industry, something our current Government is urging China and others to do. That she was a dictator who brooked no dissent is another myth about Lady Thatcher. Yes, she would lead from the front and challenge others to defeat her argument, but there are countless occasions when people did just that and contrary to their fears, their careers prospered. It's how John Major got into the cabinet. A theme of the book is also that although she revelled in being seen as a conviction politician, in reality she was very pragmatic and realised that a bull in a china shop approach rarely achieved the desired results. Trade union reform is a case in point. Contrary to popular myth, Thatcher was not 'anti-European' and most people who knew her doubt she would have supported Brexit. Her famous Bruges speech, where she said she said 'We haven't successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state only to see them reimposed at a European level' was actually very pro-European if people took the time to read the whole thing. Woke up Did you know that men can have periods and menstruate? Nope, me neither. But that's the latest quackery promoted by the more extreme parts of the trans lobby. Their logic, presumably, is that trans men are men (just as 'transwomen are women'), and as such they continue to menstruate. Bunzl, one of the biggest toiletry suppliers in the UK, has produced an inclusive language guide, God save us. It recommends that common terms such as 'sanitary', 'hygiene' and 'feminine products' should be replaced with the term 'period products' to avoid offence. Who on earth is supposed to be offended? This sort of ridiculous virtue-signalling idiocy needs to be called out by people across the board, and not just those with Nigel and Farage in their names. Biological men cannot menstruate. Fact. And that's the end of it. Every little helps For a Government that repeatedly tells us that it is unashamedly pro-growth, it has spent much of its first year in power introducing policies which achieve the exact opposite, and the chickens are starting to come home to roost. I've lost count of the number of business people I know who have imposed recruitment freezes, had to shed workers or cancel planned pay rises as a result of the decision to increase Employers' National Insurance to 15 per cent and cut the threshold to £5,000, and in addition increase the minimum wage by 6.7 per cent. There is no form of political or economic sophistry that Rachel Reeves can deploy to persuade us that there measures are anything else but growth killers. Tesco now tell us they're planning for many of their stores to shut an hour earlier as their costs have increased by £235 million, just from the NI hike alone. Proof, were it ever needed, that actions have consequences.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
British Steel must now join the modern economy, not be a prisoner of the old
The fate of incoming Labour business and industry secretaries seems to be to launch emergency rescue packages for industries that would otherwise face imminent closure. Witness Jonathan Reynolds at last Saturday's extraordinary parliamentary recall arguing for the legal right to take over the running of British Steel from its Chinese owner, Jingye, in order to save up to 3,500 jobs and Britain's strategic capacity to make steel. And witness Tony Benn, in 1974, offering a financial lifeline to 3,000 workers forming a cooperative to save motorcycle manufacture at the failed BSA plant in Meriden, near Coventry. Although 50 years apart, they both reflect the inability of the British financial and ownership system to make common cause with the state to drive forward vital innovation – and the regular crises that result. BSA's demise is a moment etched in my memory. As a young stockbroker, I had lost a good part of my savings in carelessly buying and selling BSA shares in the hours before it became defunct. As I ruefully took the bus home, I was angry not only at my idiocy but also at a financial system whose relationship with a great company was captured by dealing in its shares like casino chips even in its death throes – and into which I had been sucked. It was emblematic of a decades-old disengagement and lack of commitment to invest and support BSA, instead prioritising the capacity to pay annual dividends. More of this and Britain would be an industrial wasteland. Something had to change. One of the good outcomes from British Steel's rescue is that, at last, this may be about to happen. Like BSA, British Steel has never operated within a financial and ownership ecosystem supported by public policy that sees its objective as investment and value creation. Even when nationalised, it was simply an unwanted ward of state financed by a neglectful Treasury. By contrast, China, like Japan before it, aims to be the industrial and manufacturing powerhouse of the 21st century and puts the creation of value and investment in frontier technologies at the heart of its economics and politics – marshalled by a ruthless, autocratic, one-party state that knows its legitimacy depends on a successful economy. China's state-owned banking system is its weapon, locked in by capital controls that force it to make vast subsidised loans as directed by successive five-year economic plans. China's technological prowess, and in particular the way it has implemented its decision 20 years ago to leapfrog the industrialised west by transitioning to a green economy built on cheap renewable energy rather than expensive, imported fossil fuels, has been built on bank debt. This debt is now more than 300% of GDP – a dangerous ratio that triggered first the Japanese and then the western banking crises. But Chinese steelmaking, now half of world production, is a major beneficiary. Efficient electric arc steelmaking, requiring temperatures of up to 3,000C, needs huge volumes of cheap electricity provided by renewables. Already, renewable energy supplies two-fifths of China's capacity: it will double by 2030. Jingye, with £40bn of turnover, is located in China's biggest steel-producing province, Hebei, just north of Beijing. Like every 'private' firm in China, it has a supervisory committee of party members to ensure it complies with party wishes as set out in the national plans, as do the state banks that lend to it. This is capitalism married to Marxist-Leninism. British Steel's fate was sealed 15 months ago when Hebei province released its 'Guidelines for transition finance in the iron and steel industry', conforming to the 14th five-year nationwide plan: electric arc steelmaking powered by renewables was to become the province's industry standard. Scunthorpe was never going to get near those criteria. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion When Jingye bought the company out of receivership in 2020, there seemed a reasonable chance that Britain's cross-party commitment to renewables would underpin the next generation of electric arc steelmaking with cheap electricity. Instead, there has been a collective retreat, spearheaded by the British right, with cheap renewable power cast as 'woke'. Worse, British electricity pricing policy is organised to make the least efficient gas-fired power station capable of entering the grid, so locking electricity prices into expensive fossil fuels. Yet it was Donald Trump's tariffs that forced the decision, with China facing the growing risk of a banking crisis if its overindebted steel and power industries could not service their loans. Doubtless the Communist party committee overseeing Jingye will have agreed its action – but as much to save itself as to do down Britain. Trump's tariff war is simultaneously threatening not only the US financial system – but China's. Jingye's very survival is at stake. Jonathan Reynolds may have won sweeping powers to control British Steel to an extent Benn never dreamed of – but its future remains murky. If Britain is to avoid being the only G7 country incapable of making virgin steel, there needs to be more hard thinking about the reforms to make that possible. The UK will need a wholesale overhaul of its energy policy and an accompanying commitment to renewables to lower energy prices, massive investment in electric arc furnaces and a national strategic plan to get British steel users to buy locally. If the company is ever to go private, some combination of the national wealth fund, British Business Bank and British pension funds and insurance companies will have to anchor its ownership and commit to investment. British Steel must become part of the new economy, not a prisoner of the old. The prospect would have been laughable until very recently. But there are signs of change. The national wealth fund and British Business Bank exist. Today's City is much more aware that its strength is interdependent with the strength of the British economy; there is to be a second 'Mansion House compact' this summer in which pension fund managers commit to invest up to 10% of their funds in innovative startups and scaleups. The government is committed to an industrial strategy and is preparing to overhaul energy pricing policy to better reflect the cheapness of renewables. The free market economics that warranted all the disengagement and lack of interest that drove de-industrialisation and decline is at a dead end. Companies that fail are part and parcel of capitalism; what makes failure acceptable is if they are accompanied by companies that succeed – thus the importance of creating the ecosystem in which more of that happens. There is a long way to go, but Britain could be feeling its way to answers that have eluded it for decades. Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
