AT THIS year’t TUC Congress, motions from Unite, Unison, RMT, GMB and Community point to the urgency of formulating an “ambitious industrial strategy.” 

They recognise that our freedom outside the EU and the single market enables us to use “public procurement to drive reindustrialisation,” and the fundamental need “to improve steel procurement in the energy sector, construction, transport defence and other major infrastructure projects.”

We haven’t had such crucial motions for decades.

To start with, no-one should underestimate the depth, impact and scope of de-industrialisation. 

In 1979, manufacturing accounted for close to 30 per cent of British GDP. Today, that figure is 8-9 per cent, with employment in the sector falling from 6.8 million to 2.6 million workers. But the figures tell only part of the story.  

The reality is a country transformed, its people more divided and impoverished, year-on-year trade deficits, riddled with super-rich tax evaders, and a permanent cost-of-living crisis.

The richest 10 per cent of the population now receives 35 per cent of Britain’s income in yearly bonuses, dividends, capital gains, and rents. 

The richest 1 per cent holds more than 20 per cent of the total wealth, while the poorer half of the country holds around 5 per cent.

The movement and government must now unite around the creation of a truly comprehensive alternative economic strategy that reverses nearly 50 years of the most exceptional economic destructiveness.

Fairer taxes and better economic management alone are not going to improve things. 

As Costas Lapavitsas, Larry Elliott and I argue in our new book, Reindustrialise Britain, to be launched on Monday at Congress, the country’s real problems are not those of distribution, but of production. We don’t produce enough to pay our way.

The country needs more than new planning laws, more social housing and a wealth tax. 

Nor will taking utility companies back into public ownership magically unleash the economic growth needed to sustain further public investment. 

There is clearly public demand for a more prosperous, less unequal economy, but this will only happen if there is a state-led strategy of reindustrialisation. 

We need to make things again because that is how wealth is created. Our state machinery and Civil Service have the skills and agility to serve a new programme of economic renewal.

This is not about a return to the 1970s. Rather, it is a recognition that there can be no genuine and sustained prosperity without a strong manufacturing base. 

It means a commitment to foundational industries, such as steel, as well as advanced engineering, automation, digital technology and clean, sovereign energy supply and generation. 

Naturally major public investment is needed. But we must spell out where this investment would come from and how much.

We argue investments should be channelled through a properly funded national investment bank, which would have a mandate to provide long-term, patient capital for transport, energy and industrial supply chains and secure returns for long-term investors.

So, a 10-year programme of investment would be tied to public-equity stakes, ensuring an incremental rebuilding of public wealth and ownership. We have costed this out in detail and believe it is more than affordable.

We’ve tried to tackle the major obstacles that need to be overcome. 

One is that the hollowing out of manufacturing in recent decades has meant a loss of technical knowhow and hands-on experience. Britain has a pressing need for technicians and engineers, and that means investment in skills and technical training and properly planned immigration policies. 

Unions have a key role in this. A renewal of sectoral bargaining and broadening of the bargaining agenda should lead to comprehensive labour market and skills development plans in every sector.

Market resistance

The days of Treasury orthodoxy, which says the more you spend on good public things, the unhappier the bad boys are, so you shouldn’t spend too much, are well and truly over. 

Significantly, we will all need deal with the financial markets, who have persuaded the political parties they are all powerful and can demolish a government as easily as they did Liz Truss.

We have dealt with this in detail and looked at how a range of capital controls can be carefully considered and applied without spooking the horses. 

The bond markets were unleashed by Thatcher in October 1979 and could be controlled again. Where there is a political will there is a way, but we have spelt out specific proposals in this regard.

The City of London can’t run the country anymore. Measures to prevent its blackmail and threatened disinvestment from our shores, with all our bounty, can be introduced by a committed government. Such measures would be very popular.

Capital controls are neither exotic nor radical. 

These were standard policies in Britain from 1945 to 1979, the period of the country’s strongest growth performance in recent times. 

They are currently used by China, India, and many other successful industrial nations. Even the International Monetary Fund has acknowledged their legitimacy under conditions of financial instability. 

Their purpose is not to cut Britain off from the world but to change the incentives for fast-moving speculative capital, preventing it from disrupting the productive sector and limiting the power of finance over elected governments.

Let’s hope that starting to think about these big issues at this Congress can mark a positive turning point to reverse the decline represented by the negative turning point marked when Congress 1988 thought the EU and joining its single market would solve everything.

Doug Nicholls is the former general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, attending his 40th TUC Congress this year. Reindustrialise Britain: A strategy for wealth creation is a new book by Costas Lapavitsas, Larry Elliott and Doug Nicholls, published by Polity Press, will be launched at a fringe meeting at the TUC on Monday September 14 and is available with bulk discount offers for trade unions.