The elephant in the room: why UK living standards may be lower in 2030 than they were in 2019 or even 2007 and what we can do to stop this happening
by John Mills
Civitas £10

The virus crisis has taught us that we need to move towards greater self-sufficiency — or would we rather continue to depend on China for personal protective equipment, for 5G communications and for nuclear power stations?
 
We have deindustrialised more than any comparable country, damaging jobs, regional balance and productivity.

The share of our GDP coming from manufacturing has fallen from a third in 1970 to less than a tenth now. We invest a falling share of GDP in machinery and equipment — only 2.8 per cent, down from 3.6 per cent in 2008.

Now as independence approaches, we can free ourselves from the demands of global capital which has been stifling all too many economies. As globalisation has accelerated in the last 45 years, the growth rate in the developed world has fallen from 4 per cent a year in 1950-75 to 2 per cent since 2000. The more globalised, the less growth.

Mills notes, “monetarism and neoliberalism... managed to get their grip on the EU, leading to the determination — exemplified in the provisions of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty — to put monetary stability before prosperity.”

The EU wrote Thatcherism into its treaties but it failed in the EU just as it had failed in Britain. Between early 2009 and the end of 2017 the eurozone grew by just 0.5 per cent a year. Unemployment averaged 9.8 per cent. The closer the union, the lower the growth.

Unfortunately, when Mills writes about the socialist countries, he says not a word about the brutal blockade regime which the capitalist powers enforced on them throughout their existence. This blockade played the key role in preventing them improving the quality of their products through trading freely with other countries.

Nor does Mills so much as mention Cuba, which despite the US-enforced vicious and illegal blockade has developed as an independent country with exceptional standards of health, welfare, and education.

With independence from January 1, our future is in our hands. We can rebuild industry; we can restore the economy after the virus.