>>2853065It's not idiotic at all, even before you introduce comparative advantage or any other economic principles Nauru obviously has far less land to give over to a gigantic polluting steel mill than China does, landlocked Uganda has far less capacity to export steel than coastal Korea does, and so on.
We sell bombs to Israel because we've got an asinine policy of being totally slavish to the US (for which the logical step is to buy all our weapons from them for interoperability advantages + low unit costs) while also producing our own bespoke weapons as a subsidy to the arms industry even though that results in overpriced weapons that don't work and don't interoperate with our allies very well. It is, in fact, downstream of this stupid idea that there's something morally upstanding about "self sufficiency" and something morally wrong about selling music and comedy to a nation of steelmakers in exchange for some steel.
>>2853082This is true as it goes, but it's a question of where capital is best invested. If both exports and imports increase but exports increase by twice as much as imports, our trade balance also improves. There is a world where we throw vast sums of money at a reindustrialisation scheme (which will no doubt require imports in the short run) only for it to totally flop as consumers reject overpriced low-quality domestic goods, where the same money thrown at tourism or education would've generated export revenue.
>>2853088There is no such thing as independence in the manner you envision. Is Germany really more independent than Britain just because it runs a massive trade surplus?
>>2853091Nationalisation just makes things worse by lowering failure standards. Fundamentally the problem with Britain is a lack of institutional talent and experience, particularly since we destroyed a lot of it. This is true in both our public and private sectors. If you really insist that Britain must have domestic industry, the best way to start would be to bring in a bunch of Chinese or Korean managers and have them set it up. (Though this has the problem that they've got very strong incentives to do a Malaysia on us and have us just make intermediate goods for Chinese or Korean firms without capturing much value ourselves.)
>>2853098Britain never seriously tried neoliberalism. Other than airlines basically every privatisation was fake, into a state-regulated market with stupid state-regulated incentives to be a stupid state-regulated cunt. Not in a "they won't even let you put arsenic in foods these day" whining sense either, in the sense of: we privatised electricity but left pricing decisions in the hands of the state. We privatised railways but left basically every detail of the contract for each franchise's routes, frequencies, ticket prices, etc, in the hands of the state. Idiotic! Half of these things shouldn't have been privatised even if corporatised and the other half should've been privatised for real.
>>2853102We do actually build engines and wings for planes, it's one of the things we're good at and the kind of high-value-added (but low employment) industries we'd do well to focus on as a small but important aside to a services-focused economic strategy. (I've left it out so far because it'd distract from the wider point that our primary advantages lie in services), and we should also start massive public works programs (although in UK classifications, construction
is a service industry.)
>>2853111Since nobody'll like what I'm selling anyway, I'll advance a fun contentious theory: one problem with Britain's labour market is that the minimum wage is too high for an optimal distribution of British labour. It's not that it's actually enough to live on, but that the pay differences between low-end occupations are squeezed. Why would you be a social care worker for 25p an hour more than you get in a supermarket? So people wait for supermarket jobs to open up rather than taking social care positions, in some cases, people who
would take a social care position if it was £5 an hour more than working in a supermarket.
If you just pay everyone a living wage you wind up at the same place you started, because the differential between wages hasn't changed. Unfortunately the only pragmatic solution to this would be to fix the economy in general and then throw some revenue at subsidising social care, since the alternative (squeezing or abolishing the minimum wage) would be ugly and miserable.
unless minimum wage abolition was paired with UBI, which isn't a bad idea…Personally, no amount of money would get me working in social care, short of some pretty draconian reforms that make it the only alternative to starvation. But that's just me, everyone has their own preferences.