So the Chinese are buying up Sheffield. Tell me economic nationalists where's the outcry?

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You'll all recall the outcry - much of it pig-ignorant - over the sale of ARM Holdings to a Japanese company. Between people blaming Brexit and a veritiable torrent of slightly leftish economic nationalism we were told that this was a terrible foreign take over. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't (I lean towards the latter - after all I'd be cheering on a British business buying a Japanese company why not the reverse).

What I don't understand it the selective nature of this economic nationalism. I've not picked up anything like the same sort of negative response to this:

In the biggest Chinese investment outside London, Sheffield city council announced that an initial £220m would pay for four or five city centre projects over the next three years and create “hundreds if not thousands” of jobs in south Yorkshire.

The partnership is between Sheffield city council and Sichuan Guodong Construction Group, one of the biggest firms in China’s south-western Sichuan province.

What, dear reader, is the difference between a massive Chinese conglomerate buying up big chunks of Sheffield city centre and the (admittedly larger) inward investment deal that was the ARM takeover? Or for that matter the perennial whining and whimpering about foreign investment in London property? I mean, if you're going to be an economic nationalist - adopt the daft Will Hutton view of industry - then, for heaven's sake, be a consistent economic nationalist.

What we have here is a massive Chinese investment in UK property - celebrated by The Guardian. Just the sort of thing the same paper was railing against a short while ago:

Foreign buyers now own close to 10% of the UK’s housing stock, he claims, and, unchecked, will gobble up much more, increasingly in Manchester, Edinburgh and other regional cities. With the global financial elite numbering at least 15 million, “increasing housing supply can never bring down prices, no matter how much public land and green belt is turned into flats, because the demand for investment returns is almost infinite.”

Thes epeople really do need to make their minds up. Just because this is a snuggly deal between a Labour Council and a big Chinese corporation (with all the lack of accountability that goes with this sort of deal) doesn't make it special or better - it's just as much foreigners buying up British assets as the ARM deal or a thousand other mergers, property investments and stock purchases. All in all a reminder that economic nationalism is stupid.

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The Tale of Peter Who Thought Things Weren't Made In Britain

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The alarm rings and our economic nationalist awakes - we'll call him Peter. Rising from slumbering in his Silentnight bed (made in Barnoldswick in that bit of Lancashire that used to be Yorkshire), Peter stumbles across the room to the shower to conduct his morning ablutions.

Peter's a traditional sort of chap and likes good old-fashioned soap - Imperial Leather (made by Cussons in Manchester). It's the day of the week for hair washing and Peter lathers up with Head & Shoulders (from those nice Proctor & Gamble folk in Newcastle) and then shaves with products developed in Reading for Gillette.

His ablutions complete, Peter dresses in clothes nicely washed and pressed by his attentive wife. She uses an Ebac machine (made in Newton Aycliffe up in County Durham) and the washing powder is made by Unilever in the delightfully named Port Sunlight on Merseyside (as is the conditioner that makes everything soft and pleasantly odoured).

Coming downstairs Peter smiles as he ponders today's incisive commentary - a paen to a lost past of British manufacturing. But first it's breakfast - coffee (from Kenco at Banbury in Oxfordshire) with milk and sugar (from British Sugar's plant in Bury St Edmunds), a bowl of cornflakes (made by Kellogg's at Trafford Park) all followed by toast (Warburton's bread from Bolton) with butter (Country Life fresh from Nuneaton) and Baxter's jam (made by the eponymous family business in Moray).

Before leaving the house, Peter sits in the living room (on a sofa made by DFS in Leeds) and flicks through the papers, tutting all the while at the demise of Great Britain as a manufacturing nation. Slipping on his Church's brogues (from Northampton of course) he walks down the garden path and gets into his shiny Jaguar (made at Castle Bromwich in the lovely city of Birmingham) to drive into town.

Arriving at his desk, Peter nurses another coffee (from Nescafe's UK factory at Tutbury in Derbyshire) and gazes out the window (a PVC unit made for Everest in Sittingborne, Kent) trying to get the right combination of words for a corruscating and telling article about how Tory government means Britain no longer makes anything. Peter breaks off for a couple of meetings across the corridor in the big room. There are biscuits (made by United Biscuits up in Carlisle) and more coffee (Nescafe again from Derbyshire) which is served on the fine table (made by Hands in High Wycombe).

Peter returns to his desk - he knows the words he'll use now:

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

It is a terrible thing indeed that Britain no longer makes anything except for sale in "absurdly expensive luxury shops".

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What links Peter Hitchens, John McDonnell and Donald Trump?

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The answer is a hatred of free markets, free trade and free enterprise plus a belief that the solution to our supposed economic problems is economic nationalism. All these fine men promote nationalisation, speak of the evils of foreign investment, and play to the fears of workers about foreigners, big business and the bankers.

I considered heading this article with some like "In which Peter Hitchens goes full Fascist" but that would be a little polemical. Hitchens has, for over twenty years now, conducted a one man hate fest directed at the Conservative Party. On more than one occasion he has used his pulpit to pray for the Party's destruction so it must be a cause of deep and personal pain that this organisation he despises so much got it self elected with an overall majority in the UK parliament.

It shows:

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

And more along these lines, not based on any actual facts or anything as mundane as research, just Hitchens' absolute belief that the Conservative Party and all its works is a thing of great evil. So what we get is an advert for Hitchen's Conservatism - one essentially indistinguishable from that of Donald Trump. It's a sort of admission of defeat, a belief that inside a cosy little barrier built from tariffs, bans and protections we will be reborn as a 'great nation' filled with horny-handed sons of toil bashing away making things. I can see the posters lifting the spirits of our nation now, images of those workers looking to a noble future arm in arm with their families.

Britain, for the Hitchens of this world, is crying out for a new direction - a New Party - that rejects globalisation, foreign investment, free trade and the idea that running a restaurant is as noble a pursuit as pouring molten steel from British blast furnaces. The world conjured up by Hitchens and Trump is a dystopia where foreigners, drug dealers, shadowy businessmen and venal politicians conspire to do down the decent, honest working men of Britain and America. It is a fearful place where only a powerful state with a strong leader can protect what little is left of our greatness.

This is the dark side of conservatism, the place where nationalism and a sense of national injustice push aside the hopeful and aspirational conservatism that yearns for people to be free, for them to be able to make their own choices and live their own lives. This is the consequence of an obsession with security - national security, community safety, energy security, food security, local resilience - that acts only to justify the longer reach of the state, that fools people again into thinking that our telephone services before privatisation was in any way at all better than the service we enjoy today.

This is the world where the intervention of government in industry, supposedly driven by some sort of 'industrial strategy', is determined by political considerations, by the imminence of elections and the influence of union barons or the media. Billions of our taxes are splurged on bailing out industries, mountains of tariffs are built and, before we know it, prices are being fixed and markets set in stasis with the result being decline, poverty and economic collapse.

It'll look so fine at the start as Hitchens' New Party winds back the liberalisation of the Thatcher years. Vital national industries are defined, plans and strategies are written, solid, broad-bottomed men are set onto the boards of the industries - Great Britain is reborn. And then it doesn't work - small exporting manufacturers close because they can't compete, the higher taxes needed to pay for the intervention mean less investment and billions of foreign investment gets relocated to places that are more friendly, more likely to provide a return on those billions.

It's easy to talk of a lost age of 'making':

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

But this covers over the deeper truth - that we are so much richer and happier than we were when those industries were booming. It's a myth that we are poorer for the loss of dirty, unpleasant dangerous jobs down mines, in foundries and in factories. We are not poorer - the children of those workers are mostly doing better paid and safer jobs of offices and will live to be 80 or older rather than dying painfully in their sixties of industrial diseases. Even Hitchens reluctantly hints at this betterment with his talk of luxuries, better coffee and better restaurants.

These are not fripperies but things that - in Hitchens' golden age - used only to be there for the rich and powerful. The miners, steel workers and factory hands of that age of glory didn't have a decent car (if at all), never went to restaurants and couldn't afford a foreign holiday. Today's equivalent worker has all those things plus a bewildering array of new stuff - smartphones, digital TVs, ice-makers, microwave ovens, power tools and fridge freezers. And their children - our children - will be even richer, having things we can only imagine right now.

But we'll only get those things if we cling to the revolution for which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are rightly praised - free trade, free markets and the celebration of free enterprise. Building walls - real or regulatory - isn't a route to poverty not a salvation. And economic nationalism - whether it's sold to us a 'socialist' by a Labour shadow chancellor or 'conservative' by a Daily Mail columnist - always, everywhere, gets worse results than the free trade it forces out.

The evidence from approaching four decades of neoliberalism, of our embracing a global economy, is that it has led to the biggest, sustained improvement of well-being in human history. To throw all this aside to indulge in an orgy of self-pitying nationalism would be an act of monumental folly. Yet that folly is just what Peter Hitchens, John McDonnell and Donald Trump are offering.

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