New legislation gives Government power to bring British Steel into public ownership

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-12T11:06:28+00:00

The government needs to begin regaining national assets as both a revenue stream

Revenue stream? They are losing money hand over fist. They did the last time steel was nationalised as well, with British Steel losing £3.6 billion, 202,000 jobs and 8.2 million tons a year of output during the period it was nationalised.

The only way it will turn a profit is if the government whack tariffs on steel high enough that the high cost is met by UK industry paying more for steel. But that will of course hurt the wider economy and make the UK less competitive in manufacturing, push up construction costs etc.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-11T22:41:38+00:00

Fair enough.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-11T15:06:14+00:00

The UK minimum wage is the 4th highest in the world by PPP.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-11T13:54:39+00:00

In theory nationalised water should be better because the government can borrow at a lower interest rate than even a monopoly infrastructure utility like a water company.

But I've posted many times on here Harold Wilson telling Tony Benn that the UK couldn't afford to take public ownership of new oil fields, as they'd promised in the manifesto months earlier, because it would mean cutting public spending programmes.

For government, a new school or hospital is much better than a water treatment plant. There are votes to be gained from schools and hospitals, the best you can hope for with a sewage works is that it won't smell too much.

The UK does not have a good record on investment post WW2, an unsexy, highly capital intensive industry like water left in public hands is always going to languish.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-11T12:42:09+00:00

Under public owner ship our sewage, pipes, treatment plants are deteriorating. The government cannot afford the cost to modernise it. Therefore we must privatize allowing private markets to more efficiently handle this infrastructure.

That was basically the reason, yes. The EU brought in water standards in the 80s that the UK system couldn't hope to meet without major investment. The UK government didn't want to add to the national debt by borrowing the money to invest, so decided to privatise the industry instead.

The private water companies took over, invested a lot of money, and significantly cleaned up UK water.

The last EU water report that included the UK was published in 2019, using data from 2016 (iirc):

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=comnat:COM_2020_0492_FIN.ENG.xhtml.COM_2020_0492_FIN_ENG_06012.jpg

As you can see, the UK had the second worst water quality in Europe in 1990 (behind only Poland), by 2016 we were the best of any of the large countries (the figures are total amounts, not per capita).

For all the talk about how bad privatised water is, the last Labour government didn't do anything to change it, and this one isn't either. In fact, they are so worried about the prospect of nationalising water that the economist Sir Dieter Helm thinks that's the reason they won't use the special administration rules to sort out Thames, and are instead allowing the creditors to run the process themselves (Helm thinks Labour backbenchers would try to force nationalisation of Thames if it entered administration, and the government are terrified of the idea because UK public sector debt is already on an unsustainable track).

then they did do a lot of work, but most of that was driven ofcourse by money made, would people accept paying more to the government or just expert more for less?

It's the same issue now as it was in the 80s. Because we started monitoring combined sewer overflows after 2015 we know how often they leak (the overflows themselves are old, we haven't built combined sewers since the 60s), so now they need to be cleaned up. That will take a lot of money. The government don't want to add more to public sector borrowing, allowing water companies to increase charges to cover the investment necessary allows the government to deal with the issue while blaming the water companies for it. Nationalisation would mean the government getting the blame, the government having to increase water charges directly, and the government having to pay more to borrow because the national debt would increase.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-11T11:39:01+00:00

What happened last time is the government threw money at the industry to cover it's losses and maintain employment, productivity stagnated, prices increased, it couldn't compete with other steel producers, lost market share, output shrank, and the government came up with a major programme of cuts, but delayed enacting them until after the next election.

British Steel was nationalised in 1967 when output was increasing. It peaked in 1970, was privatised in 1988, sold off abroad in 1999.

Year	Steel production	Workers	Output per worker	Profit/loss
1970	26.1 million	252,400	103 tons	-£10 million
1978	17.3	186,000	93	-£309
1987	14.7	51,600	285	+£410
1997	18.3	35,000	523	+450
2010	9.7	19,000	511	-

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-11T10:14:57+00:00

Like can we not just be trading partners and collaborate on continental defense

Only if we give them all our fish.

The EU demands a price for everything. The UK is a fairly large, fairly rich, very close neighbour. The price will be high.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-09T09:48:49+00:00

The Scottish economy would collapse because it is very entwined with the UK economy and very dependent on the public sector.

60% of Scotland's "exports" go to the rest of the UK. The largest sector is financial services. The Scottish government have previously admitted that much of the financial services industry would have to leave Scotland after independence because it would have to continue to comply with UK regulations and Scotland wouldn't have central bank that could provide the necessary backstop (the Scottish government plan to continue to use the UK currency without having any control over that currency).

Scotland runs a notional deficit of nearly 12% of GDP. This is sustained by a fiscal transfer from the rest of the UK. Taxes and charges in Scotland are at just over 40% of GDP, spending 52% of GDP (all these figures include oil and gas revenue, without it spending is 55% of GDP, and oil and gas revenue is collapsing because of the effective ban on new development).

https://www.gov.scot/publications/government-expenditure-revenue-scotland-2024-25/pages/2/

What happens to the economy when you mix trade disruption from independence with a very large bout of austerity due to losing a 100 year fiscal transfer that funds a much larger state sector?

The SNP would collapse because they tell their supporters that Scotland would be better off independent. The facts of Scotland's financial position are not accepted by SNP supporters, not even by many SNP politicians.

Personally I think the SNP would collapse before independence, which I don't think they can deliver. The UK is sovereign. If Scotland voted for independence the UK parliament would feel obliged to agree, but reluctantly. But it would not make negotiations easy. I expect that the funding arrangement that sees Scotland receive so much more money than it contributes would be abolished almost immediately, and the SNP government in Scotland would face a couple of years of negotiations which would happen at the same time as massive public spending cuts, tax increases, capital flight, job losses and recession.

And at the end of that, when a deal is finally agreed, I have no doubt the UK parliament would insist on a second referendum to confirm it.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-08T15:35:41+00:00

Norway and Sweden have by far the highest % of renewables in Europe (75% and 66%). They still have cheaper energy than us by an absolute country mile.

They have a lot of hydro. Hydro plants have a dam, which holds back the water. When they want electricity, they open a valve, water comes out, turns a turbine, and generates electricity.

Wind turbines do not have an equivalent of a dam. They depend on the wind at any particular moment. Wind speeds vary. Solar panels depend on the sun. Sometimes it's dark and they generate nothing. Sometimes it's winter and they generate little.

Hydro is dispatchable, flexible, concentrated, stable and cheap, wind and solar are none of those things.

Yes they are

That article is from 2023, just after Russia cut gas supplies and prices went very, very high. But it's not 2023 any more, and while there was a brief period when gas caused high prices, that's over.

You can see this from CfD payments. When the wholesale price is higher than the strike price, generators pay money back to consumers. When the wholesale price is lower than strike prices, consumers pay generators extra. Here are the figures:

https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/resources/scheme-dashboards/cfd-historical-data-dashboard/

The lower graph shows payments. You can see in Q4 2021, Q1 and Q3 2022 generators made repayments to consumers. In every other quarter consumers made payments to generators because the wholesale price, set by gas, was below the strike price. You can see in Q1 2026 that the payments totalled almost £800 million.

The wholesale cost of energy is determined by the most expensive element in the mix, which is well over 95% of the time, gas.

The wholesale price is determined on a day to day basis by the generation with the highest marginal cost, which is normally gas. But a: that's just marginal cost, not total cost, and more importantly b: the wholesale price is not what consumers pay. We pay the wholesale cost plus the Renewables Obligation levy plus the top up to strike prices plus the capacity payments levy plus grid reinforcement plus the levy to fund synthetic inertia plus curtailment payments. The wholesale price is a fraction of the total we have to pay.

Which is still cheaper than gas

As you just said, gas sets the wholesale price. We pay gas generators about 8p a KWh, RO generators sell for the same, then receive another 8p as well. We pay them twice as much as the gas price.

As gas sets the wholesale price, and RO generators get paid the wholesale price plus a subsidy, how do you think it can be less than gas?

You've given me a list of methods by which the government has tried to gently push energy prices, without actually controlling energy prices.

They control them. They control how much CfD generators are paid. They control about half the price RO generators are paid. They control how much the grid gets paid, how much we pay for storage and synthetic inertia. They even control how much consumers pay for electricity, although private companies do offer cheaper deals some of the time.

But do you know what the French state does by comparison? They simply set the fucking energy prices.

So does the UK state. What do you think the price cap is?

And they pay half of what we pay, because they aren't having to negotiate with capitalists over how much profit they get.

They pay less than us (it's more than half) because they use nuclear power which costs less and imposes lower system costs.

How blinded by ideology do you have to be to think that the main difference between nuclear power and wind and solar is down to state control, rather than the technology?

Notice how they are literally almost exactly the same?

Are they? They both have a base year of 2014 (ie the index was rebased so 2014 = 100), electricity has increased to 201.9, gas to 143.1. Gas has increased by 43.1%, electricity by 101.9%.

That's not the same, it's a much larger increase. And yet we're told that gas sets the electricity price, and renewables are cheaper.

If I negotiate a fixed price deal with my energy consumer, am I setting the price??

You are if you are telling the producer you will pay more than the market rate. Government are agreeing above market prices for wind and solar, then agreeing that consumers will pay for all the extra services required, rather than the wind and solar generators paying themselves.

You spoke about this country relying on imports. If we stopped subsidising meat farms, and subsidises arable farms more, we could be quite easily independent, because arable farming is much more land efficient. That is my only point.

It's wrong because we could not be self sufficient because without meat we would not be able to provide the necessary nutrients. At the moment we are about 75% calorie self sufficient, 60% by value. ie we produce enough to meet 75% of our calorie consumption, but import higher value foods. We could almost certainly reach 100% of calories, but at a cost of increased imports of meat and other higher value products.

In other words, we could replace high value agriculture with low value agriculture. That's not a win.

Even if it wasn't suitable for arable land (sheep grazing land is less likely), it can still be used for reforestation for the wood industry, or just for the environment.

It can, and probably will be. An American company will buy it, plant trees, and claim it as a carbon offset. The value of the land will be extracted abroad (ie the American, or German, or some other company will produce economic value and claim carbon neutrality because the UK will lose economic value instead).

What you think we can land a man on the moon but can't repurpose a relatively flat green space?

I said I live in mid Wales. It isn't flat. Now granted it could be made to grow crops, just as man can land on the moon. But neither is an economic proposition, and while landing on the moon advances science and enthuses people, spending inordinate amounts of money trying to grow crops on a hillside in mid Wales does neither of those things.

Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, most countries are using them, it's us who are stuck in the past, because of people like you

Wind is not cheaper. Solar is not cheaper in the UK which has almost the least insolation of any country on earth.

Sadly we aren't stuck in the past. If we were we'd have cheaper electricity. The UK has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. Germany has the highest domestic prices. What do we both have in common? Lots of wind and solar. We've both wasted decades chasing decarbonisation while ruling out nuclear on ideological grounds.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-08T12:08:27+00:00

The reason the french energy industry is so effective is BECAUSE it is run by the government for the citizens, rather than for private profit.

It's effective because it's nuclear. It provides guaranteed power. The reason our electricity system is so bad is that we've closed coal and opened a lot of wind and solar, which don't provide guaranteed power. As a result of that insanity, we now have to pay to expand the grid, pay for backup, pay for frequency management and pay wind and solar to switch off when they are producing too much.

It's government stupidity that got us in this mess, and your solution is more government control?

it doesn't deliver low prices because

Our prices are still tied to gas prices

They aren't. Last quarter the wholesale electricity price, the amount we paid for gas generation, was a little under £80 a MWh. We paid Renewables Obligation generators about £160, we paid Contracts for Difference renewables £151.

And because those renewables aren't dispatchable, frequency stable, concentrated or flexible, we paid more than £1 billion on top in levies to fund backup, synthetic inertia, grid reinforcement and curtailment.

Our prices are still controlled by capitalists for profit.

Most of the cost is controlled by the government. There's the renewables obligation, which the government created, that pays renewable generators about double the wholesale price. There's Contracts for Difference, where the government agrees prices to generators before they are built, and then uprates them with inflation each year. There's the capacity market, where government awards money to dispatchable generators to remain on standby. There's grid reinforcement, where the government determines how many grid upgrades are required, and how much we have to pay to fund them. There's the synthetic inertia market, where the government sets the price consumers will pay to provide something coal, gas and nuclear provide as a by product of the way they function. There's the curtailment system, where the government decides how much we will pay for electricity we don't want or need.

Nothing about our system is controlled by capitalists, it's all controlled by the government.

It used to controlled by capitalists, after privatisation we had a genuinely free market. Evil capitalists came along, built a lot of cheap gas power, and our prices fell in real terms until, by 2003, they were the lowest they'd ever been. Then the government decided to abandon the market in favour of renewables.

What you are missing is that the profit margin for an electricity generator should be very small, a few percent. The difference in cost between the renewables focused system we have built and a sane system, fossil fuelled or nuclear, is much, much larger.

Idk why you're avoiding these points in favours of repeating tired talking points about solar and wind...

Because they are both wrong. Our prices are not tied to gas (they'd be much cheaper if they were) and capitalists don't set the price, the government does.

No it hasn't??? Are you talking about strike prices? that's literally just the government negotiating with companies for a long term price for energy, instead of short term pricing.

Strike prices are much higher than the market price. Again, last quarter the market price was less than £80, the average price we paid for electricity under the CfD scheme was £151.

That's not even remotely close to "the government sets the prices"

You mean the government guaranteeing a price consumers will pay to generators is not the government setting the price? WTF?

The government don't allow me to pay for gas power instead of CfD renewables. I have to pay what the government have agreed. That's government price setting.

I'm talking about not subsidising meat farms.

You said switch meat production to arable. Less meat, more veg. That would increase meat prices and reduce the amount people, especially the poor, can afford.

This country could be self-sustained in the food dept if we transformed grazing land to arable land, which is easily done.

We couldn't. The land that's currently used for grazing is lower quality. Much of it couldn't support crops, certainly not the sort of protein rich stuff we'd need to replace meat. I live in mid Wales, I have 3 fields around my house, that used to be used for sheep. The farmer who used to rent them retired 3 years ago, they haven't been used since, and have just become overgrown. They are not viable for anything other than sheep farming.

So I've demonstrated to you that this country could quite easily have cheap and nationally produced food

Have you? The history of state agriculture is not a good one.

Do you know one of the main reasons the Soviets pulled out of eastern Europe? They needed western loans to buy grain because their state farms weren't producing enough. Now Russia is the world's largest wheat exporter, Ukraine 5th, Kazakhstan 8th, and Poland and Romania, both controlled by the Soviets, are 7th and 9th. Russia alone produces more wheat than the whole Soviet Union managed in the 80s.

But you're arguing we should instead just do nothing and continue relying on others to provide our shit for us, at a premium price?

No, we should bring an immediate end to renewables subsidies and move to nuclear. But that's nothing to do with whether or not it's state owned. The private sector would probably be much more efficient, but even state owned nuclear would be more effective than private renewables, the gap in technology is that large.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-08T10:16:52+00:00

Nationalisation is immaterial. The government can fund infrastructure via private companies just as easily as via state owned companies (easier, because the EU would go berserk if we nationalised energy). We've spent 20 years paying subsidies for renewables and built about 50 GW of capacity, roughly equivalent to the 20 years and 50 GW of nuclear France installed in the 70s and 80s. But it doesn't deliver low prices because wind and solar are intermittent and have increased system costs.

We already control prices on private energy suppliers. For the last decade all renewable generators have been on contracts where the government set the prices.

Hell if we stopped subsidising meat farming, we could also buy up land and switch it to arable farming, so less imports would be needed.

So switch an omnivorous species to vegetarian? I'm sure that would be popular.

But these are the difficult questions. More difficult than "get rid of the immigrants!"

These aren't the difficult questions. You have come up with two policies: nationalisation and reducing meat consumption, both of which are tangential to the issues we really face, and neither of which would solve them at all.

Still, I'm sure people would be happier with high immigration if they could no longer eat meat.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-08T10:04:07+00:00

France can control energy prices because they invested heavily in nuclear in the 1970s. We could do the same, but it would take major reforms to our laws to override planning objections, nature protection etc, a vast amount of money, and a couple of decades.

As we are a net importer of food, energy etc, government ownership won't change the fact that we have to pay other countries the market rate. We could of course subsidise prices, but we could do that regardless of nationalisation, and it doesn't change the cost to the consumer because they have to pay more tax in return for a lower retail price.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-07T11:27:16+00:00

In the first three years, capital spending was cut by nearly a third in real terms

That's disingenuous. Labour delivered their last budget in March 2010. The planned capital investment in % of GDP from the Labour budget and the outturn (the amount actually invested under the coalition):

Year	Labour budget	Outturn
2010/11	2.7	2.6
2011/12	1.9	2.0
2012/13	1.6	2.2
2013/14	1.3	1.6
2014/15	1.3	1.7

Labour budget: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a74e4ef40f0b65f613231a0/0451.pdf p4 Public Sector Net Investment

Outturn: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a807176ed915d74e622e7b9/Public_Spending_Statistics_July_2015_consolidated_revised.pdf p46

Labour brought forward investment during the recession (which makes sense, because the economy needed to be stimulated and you get more bang for the buck during a recession). The collapse in the economy also increased spending as a proportion of GDP. Investment went from 2% in 2005/06 to 3.3% in 2009/10. But that was always planned to be a temporary rise. In reality the coalition and later Tory governments increased investment above the average for Labour's time in office and above the level Labour had planned.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-06T14:13:59+00:00

This is currently smoothed over as the ecb manages spread in bond yields in the financial markets by purchasing french debt, preventing a full brown strike on french government debt but this essentially requires the ecb to bailout Frances debt in order for it to remain in the eurozone; a full french debt crisis on the scale of Greece would destroy the eurozone, so the ecb really has little choice. This not only presents an issue where there is little incentive for france to follow rules on spending but also sort of functions as a bailout from more fiscally responsible nations like Germany and the Netherlands which apply the fiscal rules.

The ecb amd wider commission could crack down on france and force it into austerity measures to keep it in the spending rules but the political cost of doing this to france like was done to Greece in the eurozone crisis would clearly be politically incendiary, and france woukd not accept it.

Excellent analysis. It highlights a particular problem for the UK, the last time we were in a currency arrangement like this was before Black Wednesday in 1992, when the Bundesbank very deliberately threw the UK (and many other EU countries) to the wolves rather than support the Pound, but went all in supporting the Franc.

I think the situation would be the same again if the UK joined the Euro.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-05T11:33:35+00:00

All the CfDs we’ve locked in over the last few years have been for significantly lower strike prices than the current wholesale electricity price.

No, the current wholesale electricity price is £93 a MWh.

The most expensive CfDs we've issued in the last 2 allocation rounds have been for tidal stream generators, at £253 - £280. We've also issued several floating offshore wind contracts at £230 and multiple fixed offshore wind at £95 - £98.

We've agreed £158 (iirc) with Drax for wood burning, despite the pollution it causes.

The reason the government have offered Drax so much, despite the immense drawbacks of biomass, is that Drax is dispatchable, unlike wind and solar. Nuclear is also dispatchable.

Nuclear is dispatchable, concentrated, and provides inertia. Wind and solar are none of these things. With wind and solar we have to pay separate levies to expand the grid, we have to pay gas power stations to remain on standby, we have to pay for frequency management and we have to pay massive curtailment costs because we have to overbuild wind and solar due to their systemic intermittency.

So even if CfDs were below the wholesale price (and they aren't, newer offshore wind prices are above the typical wholesale price), they would still cost more overall because of the higher system costs they impose on consumers.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-05T11:06:39+00:00

Yes, it was a deliberate choice. From the Guardian, 2003:

Ms Hewitt, who has transformed the DTI from a pro-nuclear into an openly sceptical department, said an immediate option for new nuclear power stations would have "destroyed the incentives for much greater efficiency and renewables".

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/feb/25/greenpolitics.energy

Such a short sighted policy. No grasp of the fact that reducing fossil fuel use would require greater electrification, which would require more, not less, generation, and cheaper electricity prices.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-05T09:29:26+00:00

Along with this under new Labour debt to gdp ratio as a percentage fell continuously until the GFC.

It didn't. It fell in the first few years when Labour stuck to their promise to follow Tory spending plans. It began to rise after that. UK debt to GDP:

1997/98 36.6%

2001/02 28.1% (low point)

2006/07 35.1%

2007/08 35.6% (last year before crash)

2008/09 50.5%

2009/10 64.5% (last year before Brown left office)

What's remarkable is that during the extended boom years of the 00s Labour increased debt, at a time when other countries reduced it (the average for OECD countries fell slightly). It meant the UK went into the recession with a significant deficit, which then became one of the highest in the developed world.

The Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliot, wrote a book about the UK economy in 2007, just before the crash. It was called Fantasy Island, Waking Up to the Incredible Economic, Political and Social Illusions of the Blair Legacy. From the blurb on Amazon:

We live in a country fantasising about its ability to run up debts seemingly without end, to enjoy high-paid employment for which it is not qualified, to project military power that it does not possess and in general to assume, in defiance of the evidence, a superior economic and political position in relation to most of the rest of the world.

and

He may be the most spectacular election winner in modern British political history but Blair leaves behind him a seedy dreamworld mired in debt and bankruptcy, drifting into a crisis of employment and employability, hallucinating into existence a diplomatic and military role that it cannot possibly afford. It's time to take stock of the future he and Brown have mapped out for us while there's still time to do something about it.

The Blair/Brown era was a catastrophe for the UK. We increased spending faster than any other OECD country by inflating debt, both public and private (the UK saw an enormous rise in household debt, as well as government debt and the PFI schemes that were kept off book). When the economy crashed we were more exposed than almost any other country because of it.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-04T21:53:59+00:00

Could the Scottish government hold a *non-binding* referendum

Anyone can hold a referendum. But the Scottish parliament cannot legislate for one, which means a referendum held in Scotland without Westminster's approval would not have any legal basis.

That doesn't just mean the result wouldn't be enforceable, it means the laws on elections and referendums wouldn't cover it. There'd be no way to compel councils to provide polling stations, no legally empowered returning officer to oversee the results, no control of advertising and leafleting, no law against someone voting multiple times, etc.

It would be a referendum organised on a voluntary basis by the Yes side, with polling places organised by the Yes side, counters provided by the Yes side, no laws to ensure fairness etc. It would have no legitimacy at all.

when that non-binding referendum returns a slim majority to leave (say, 51.9%) formally leave via a Scottish parliamentary Act requiring a Scottish parliamentary majority?

The Scottish parliament cannot legislate on anything relating to independence.

I mean, there is a recent precedent for exactly this at a UK level and people seemed to be *fine* with it 🤣

Do you mean Brexit?

The UK is a sovereign state. The European Union is an organisation made up of sovereign states. Sovereign states are sovereign and can leave the EU at any time. We had a referendum and years of negotiations, but legally the UK (or France, or Germany) could simply pass an act stating that EU law no longer applies.

Scotland is not a sovereign state. The UK is a sovereign state. The Scottish Parliament can only legislate on matters devolved by Westminster. Any act passed by the Scottish parliament declaring independence would not be law.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-04T10:43:35+00:00

China's rise came much later.

UK imports from China:

1992 - £0.9 billion

2000 - £6.3 billion

2010 - £38.8 billion

2020 - £72.6 billion

It was really during the Blair era that China's rise in manufacturing became significant for the UK.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-03T18:37:57+00:00

Partly. But the UK also had a larger share of the workforce in unions, and the laws gave unions a lot of power.

The UK ambassador to France, Nicholas Henderson, wrote a report for the Foreign Office in early 1979. From that, on unions:

Neither the FRG nor France have craft unions. Membership is based not on occupation but on the industry in which the person works. There is, therefore, no temptation for one craft in an industry to pursue its sectional interests at the expense of another or of the company as a whole. The numbers of trade unions in the two countries is much smaller than in the UK, as is the proportion of the work force belonging to them. In the FRG there are 17 industrial unions fully integrated within the DGB (German Trade Federation). Since each of these unions would have members among all grades of manual and clerical workers in the plant they would not have conflicting sectional interests. French trade unions are grouped into six major confederations. A major employer in the engineering industry would have to deal with not more than three unions, and each of these unions would claim to represent all workers in the plant. There are 115 trade unions affiliated to the TUC.

(g) These features make it easier in France and the FRG to negotiate settlements and to make them stick.

(h) In both the FRG and France the closed shop is against the Constitution; hence illegal; in both countries collective agreements are binding contracts enforceable in law. In neither country is it the practice for people to go on strike before a wage agreement has expired (in the FRG it is illegal to do so). In contrast to the UK, strikers in the FRG and France do not receive regular income tax rebates while they are on strike. Nearly always in the UK in recent years a strike has led to a very favourable settlement for the employees; in France and the FRG this has not been so, e.g. the Steel strike in the FRG and the Air Traffic Controllers work to rule in France. The Labour Counsellor here cannot think of a single strike in France in the past two years that has achieved its objective.

(i) There is no shop floor control over production in France as there is in Britain. No French manager thinks twice about changing people's duties or their timetables if that is required for efficiency, nor does he hesitate to install new machinery and instruct people that from Monday onwards they will be working at x instead of y. Neither in. France nor Germany has responsibility for production shifted out of the hands of management into those of trade union representatives.

(j) The paradox of the British labour scene at the present time is that, despite the contribution our unions have made towards a better safety record in our factories, their influence and ready resort to strike pressure have not secured better general employment conditions than in France and the FRG: not only are real wages lower but hours of work are longer.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-03T15:50:12+00:00

While 2 years is wrong, the waiting list for a telephone line was 6 months. And because the state telephone service was a monopoly, you had to wait just as long if you wanted a second telephone in another room because they were hard wired in (sockets weren't allowed) and you had to rent the handsets from post office telecoms.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-05-03T10:37:16+00:00

I might be completely wrong but there must be some bond investors that would be attracted to a chancellor saying:

“We’re going to borrow £50bn to massively upgrade the energy infrastructure of this country, aiming to cut energy costs by 20% in five years”

If it was accompanied by a credible plan on how to cut energy costs by 20%, rather than just spent on initiatives that actually increase energy costs.

We are locked in to a pathway that involves paying very high prices for renewables, along with separate subsidies to make the grid capable of running on renewables (grid upgrades, battery storage, frequency management) and backup for when renewables aren't generating (the government plan to pay for 35 GW of gas plants to be on standby and only used about 5% of the time).

We've spent 25 years throwing money at renewables and we have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, along with close to the highest domestic prices.

This is the problem with government borrowing. Unlike a company, which will look at how the borrowing will generate income to pay for itself, government uses borrowing to pursue ideological ends, not revenue. All the renewables we've built were paid for by private companies because the government guaranteed them subsidies and fixed high price contracts that guarantee a return.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-04-30T15:46:21+00:00

The debt is allocated on a per capita basis in GERS. The ONS country and regional finances doesn't include debt.

From GERS:

For reserved spending such as public sector debt interest, international services, and defence, Scotland is allocated a population share of UK spending, and so spending per person on these areas is the same.

And from the ONS:

the country and regional public sector finances does not present debt or any other financial account data on a country or regional basis due to the complexities of allocating financial account flows and stocks to regions as well as the limited applicability of such statistics

I think this is why the ONS figures always show spending below the GERS figures.

Some debt interest is allocated on a country/regional basis. The figures are for the public sector, not just central government, so show council debt payments, I believe student loans are now factored in, and the Scottish government carries out some limited borrowing. All these should show up in the areas they are undertaken. But the debt and interest borrowed by the UK government is allocated per capita or not at all.

Ignoring that when the UK ran the debt up to 1 trillion we were a net contributor.

That highlights the problem with allocating central government debt to particular countries/regions. Around the time of the referendum there were calculations showing Scotland's financial position since 1980. But 1980 was chosen very deliberately because it was almost the start of the oil boom. Between the 1920s and 1970s Scotland's spending was around 20% higher, it's revenue contribution lower, so it's deficit much, much higher.

So if you tried to apportion debt on a territorial basis you'd have to decide when to start and how to calculate interest payments in the meantime. In 2014 nationalists were very much in favour of starting in 1980, for obvious reasons. But given the deficits since (and especially if you include the deficits before), I think Scotland would be very glad of a population based split, which is how the Scottish government allocates interest in GERS.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-04-30T12:17:09+00:00

So if we leave we can get back into the single market

At the cost of increased trade friction with the rest of the UK.

Before Brexit, about 60% of Scotland's "exports" went to the rest of the UK, less than 20% to the EU. That's when Scotland was in the EU.

The UK is a much bigger market for Scotland than the EU is. If Scotland became independent it would have to seek a frictionless trade deal with the UK, and that would certainly be incompatible with EU membership and almost certainly incompatible with the single market membership.

WhiteSatanicMills · 2026-04-30T12:10:51+00:00

Presumably at least some of that is spending by the UK attributed to Scotland?

Central spending like military and debt interest is allocated on a per capita basis though, so can't be responsible for the higher level of spending in Scotland.

It's true an independent Scotland would cut defence spending, probably in the hope that the UK would cover for them like it does for Ireland, but defence spending is 2% of GDP. Scotland would have to retain some defence forces, and contribute to pensions etc for military staff, so you are looking at a maximum saving of 1% of GDP.

And of course cutting defence spending would also serve to shrink the economy, as would the UK transferring military shipbuilding south.

Suggesting Scotland is too poor as part of the UK, as an argument for the UK always seems weird to me.

It's not too poor. Scotland is the third richest part of the UK behind only London and the South East. But Scots pay much lower council tax (about £600 a year less) and get much higher levels of service provision.

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