RIP the British Steel Industry, murdered by The EU. Vote Leave

by Ian R Thorpe

A decision by the Tata Board about the future of steel-making in Port Talbot to be made today will decide if the steel industry of South Wales will survive. The Port Talbot plant is currently losing around a million pounds a day. It must be stressed that the problems are not the fault of Port Talbot management, the workers, or the owners, Indian conglomerate, Tata Industries. The crisis is almost entirely due to the incompetence and politically correct thinking that governs the policy decisions of the European Union ruling bureaucracy in Brussels.

Having said that, Tata are not the most highly committed of global corporations to preverving local communities. Let me remind you of what I was writing about this major player in the traded carbon credits scam back in 2009. Yes I said player in the traded carbon credits scam. You might think that a global conglomorate, one of the world's biggest steel makers, a major automobile manufacturer with intereststs in coal, energy and chemicals as well as a host of less environmentally hostile industries is an unlikely participant in a busness that is about cleaning up the planet. This website has always told you climate change was a scam, munch more about money that environmental awarenes, and around the time of the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, ">Tata was closing another British Steelworks, Redcar (since reopened and closed again) to grab its carbon credits and sell them on.

Apart from EU employment laws and trade regulations that make it easy for work and jobs to be 'offshored' to low labour cost economies added to employment laws and energy taxes that make the production of many manufactured goods in the EU prohibitively expensive, the bureaucrats of Brussels have refused to react to changing economic conditions, instead preferring to take refuge in blethering about ideological idiocies such as pretending that importing a million unemployable, illiterate immigrants from the very nation we are exporting our jobs to will somehow work an economic transformation.

Recently, in response to China's dumping of cheap steel due to their overcapacity in a contracting global economy, the USA has imposed anti-dumping duties on Chinese steel, which have effectively protected steel production in the USA. The EU has done too little, too late – effectively inviting China to divert exports from the USA to the EU. The US move may expose the hypocrisy of Barack Hussein Obama's whining about the importance of Britain remaining in the EU because 'free trade', buts the sensible thing to do. Free trade has always been a myth but having become a religious dogma in the EU has led to insanities such as milk being shipped across Europe from Hungary, where dairy farmers are subsidied by the EU Common Agricultural Policy to the UK market, where dairy farmers are paid by the EU to slaughter their herds and let the pastures lie fallow. Protectionism has become a dirty word among economic academics, but the ideological insanity of cultural Marxism is far more destructive to developed societies.

Insanity aside, a fundamental problem for the steel industry in the EU is that EU energy policies mean much higher prices than those faced by steel producers in the USA or China. As former Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani put it, “We are creating an industrial massacre in Europe”. The idiotic obsession with global warming is behind this, Port Talbot is the latest example of the damage being done by that ideological scam.

As we learned in the seventies, state aid is never a long-term solution for an uncompetitive industry. But in a case where the local industry has been hit by dumping of cheap imports (and ironically, in many of those cases, our competitors prices are subsidised by our money from government tax revenue that is doled out to third world nations in foreign aid. Granting state aid could help the UK steel industry over a crisis and provide breathing space – if granting it were not against EU trade law.

This site has been committed to supporting the cause of Britain leaving the EU since before the world wide web was invented. As founder I worked in the EU Commission's admin centre in Luxembourg for several months and I was constantly appalled at the waste, the ineptitude and the obsession with extending and centralising bureaucratic control of everything.

A look at mainstream media and the line ups of political figures supporting REMAIN and LEAVE might give you the impression that REMAIN are far the stronger group. People should not lose sight of the reality that most of mainstream media (other than the rabidly left wing BBC, reluctantly funded by We The Punters, most media are corporate owned and the EU bureaucracy is in bed with the global media corporations. Also all the main political parties in the UK together have a paid membership of fewer than 450,000, less than 1% of the poulation. And it's not even the members, but the establishment grandees of those parties that are pro-European, a tiny minority. Grassroots conservatives are strongly anti and grassroots Labour supporters are far less enthusiastic about making Britain a province of federal Europe. As for the Lib Dems, they were sprayed with the political equivalent of Roundup at the last election so there grassroots have withered away.

That excellent journalist Simon Jenkins, a member of that endangered species, the classical liberal, wrote in his Guardian column recently recommending 'Leave' he does so from an excellent pedigree. He writes:

" If politics were about truth, Cameron would stun the nation tomorrow by backing no vote. (This article is really woth reading.)

The REMAIN tribe is composed of the insiders, the mass immigration loving 'progressives', big business, big finance, and the global government supporting lobby. The no tribe consists of freethinkers, lovers of democracy, people who think much that makes Britain is worth preserving, the instinctive radicals and habitual questioners of authority. On the left the divide between the old-style statism and the new left of perpetual dissent. On the right it separates the political establishment and the professional and managerial class from the grassroots. Neither tribe is happy with the present EU, as it fails in its core purpose of holding together a disparate continent in the cause of liberal democracy.