Why is No One is Talking About Deindustrialisation? Because You Kicked ‘Deniers’ Off the Airwaves!
‘High energy prices cause deindustrialisation.’ Who knew? Well, this groundbreaking discovery appears to be the implication of a short documentary film from Sky News’s Ed Conway. “Our film is up,” he told followers on X, “we spent months making this.” And it’s “about how Britain shut down many of the factories we need to feed us and defend us”. Brilliant. Exactly the sort of thing that we have been arguing TV News should have been talking about for decades. But still the conversation in Conway’s film, The UK is losing the industry that makes everything, is mute and misses the point.
At 18 minutes long, it barely scratches the surface. After visiting a decrepit salt processing works, we hear a short history of Britain’s former chemicals industrial glory fading in the story of chemicals giant ICI being broken up. A visit to yet another site, Wilton, formally operated by ICI, which “used to be one of the, if not the biggest chemicals complex in Europe, if not the world”, bemoans Conway. “Pretty much everything has shut down, we’re visiting one of the last places that hasn’t shut down.” Eight minutes in, and an interview begins with Peter Huntsman, CEO of US firm Huntsman Chemicals, which bought part of the old ICI estate, amid acres and acres of mothballed plant… DuPont… Ineos… Nylon… now mere graveyards. “My biggest cost over the next five years,” says Huntsman at nine minutes 30 seconds into the film, “will not be an increase in oil and gas prices, it will be an increase in climate taxes.”
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Wow, the MSM dipping a little toe into the shallow end of “maybe all this climate catastrophising is a load of bollocks”. It’s a start, I suppose. Baby steps. Hopefully the Overton window will move.
Whatever next; “Sky News has discovered that the pharmaceutical industry is not quite as pure as the driven snow…”?
I’m not worried about CO2 in the atmosphere but I am worried about the plutonium that will devour the earth if European leaders don’t wake up and take note of the current situation.
What we need to do is make our industries and processes as non-polluting as possible, and yes, minimise our impact on the environment as much as possible, no sensible or responsible person wants to pollute or damage the land, sea or air.
We’re not the ones illegally taking balsa from the Amazon, exploiting children in DRC, creating incredibly toxic chemical lakes extracting Lithium, strip mining, spraying who knows what shite in the atmosphere, and a whole host of destructive processes supporting a lie, whilst claiming to be saving the planet!
Thats the other side!
I recall Sir John’s ‘confrontation’ is the best way to describe it with Peter Morgan, Chairman of the Morgan Motor company back in 1990. The company were turning out six cars a week and had an order book with a seven year wait. Using his observations and analytical skills, Sir John arrived at a watered down solution such that the firm could up production to seven cars a week. Grudgingly, Peter Morgan agreed to ‘try’ and adopt Sir John’s recommendations. Morgan now turn out between eight and eighteen cars a week, with a waiting list of months not years.
I bought a new one in 1990–17,000 pounds fully loaded. The equivalent today is 80 grand.
Not quite at the same level but Richard Hammond asked his neighbour-landlord-friend-engineer-businessowner Hadrian to look over his loss-making car business and apart from getting quotes too low and not having a policy for when as often happens with cars, the job is worse than first thought, Hadrian said that the size and cost of his workshop needed more staff. Not what most people struggling to increase profits might have thought of.
It’s a great point – his asset base / investment in tools and facilities was being under utilised due to lack of staff, so therefore waste… you have to open you mind up to see those things as you say
Morgan were an interesting case – they were doing so many ‘traditional’ things for the sake of it where the customer doesn’t necessarily care how it’s done. They also had terrible flow around their factory and awful lack of control on stock, buying etc. many of these things they’ve improved in the intervening years
The greatest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated, by techncrats at the UN, our feeble compliant political class and the bought and paid for Consolidated media. ——–The Climate Change Fraud Squad know that people are way to busy with work and family life to investigate every issue for themselves and are ripe to be easily manipulated, not with facts reason and evidence, but with REPETITION. When you repeat something often enough it becomes not just the truth, but the ultimate truth.—— It becomes lodged in the brain and trying to move it is like trying to seperate a bowl of vegetable soup from a bag of cement.
Here’s a vid illustrating the dire situation Germany is in, all due to climate zealotry of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBDksYjd5BM
Yes thanks. I am aware of the silly Green Mess Germany is in. They actually have about 40,000 huge Industrial turbines and the highest electricity prices in the world along with the equally absurd UK. The Indutrial Base is being destroyed and all for WHAT?
Their two weapons are Repetition, fear mongering and lies.
Their 3 weapons are ……..
It’s good to see the unpleasant and, to my mind, sinister organisation BAFTA Albert referred to. It rarely gets a mention and richly deserves a regular hail of brickbats.
Why stop at brickbats- what’s wrong with napalm?
Oh sorry yes of course we can’t make it any more.
What you mean the little footprint symbol that appears at the end of Sky’s Premier League footie to say that is has been a carbon neutral production?
Deliberately, for a decade, steadily make it impossible for industrial businesses to operate profitably … and they eventually close down.
Who could possibly have foreseen that?
“Sky News was a founding signatory, alongside ITN, BBC, ITV News and Channel 4, to the Albert News Consortium, the aim of which is “focus on the specific environmental issues related to news and will work collaboratively to create initiatives designed to reduce the impact of news production as well as inspiring sustainable futures through its content”.”
OFCOM is meant to regulate TV and TV news content in the UK. It’s meant to be balanced. How can it be if organisations sign up to political campaigning initiatives that presuppose a fixed point of view on a subject. If we’re going to have OFCOM at all (I don’t think we should but that’s another matter) it should prohibit TV news organisations from joining or signing up to anything beyond things specifically linked to the work of journalism – journalistic ethics. That’s they should be able to do – say they abide by the law and some ethical code to do with the way they treat their sources, report news.
Such coordination between what are meant to be competitors should be attacked through monopolies legislation.
OFCOM is another organisation to push government agenda by stealth. There is no need to police media, if they break the law they should be prosecuted, the same with other QUANGOS. The are a dystopian nightmare.
Its mass depopulation such that our political elite and their donors can have the world to themselves. Those of us left will be their slaves
Would the politicians be happy if the news broadcasters signed up to promote a religion, say Catholicism? If not, why then were they comfortable with them promoting the climate religion?
Yes and many other secular religious cults are promoted including the Corona Medical Nazism from a nonexisting bat-anus ‘virus’. Most of these secular cults have more miracles and claims of the supernatural than I have seen or heard in my Catholic Church.
“We can move towards Net Zero and we can create jobs…”
…Like the rest of the managerial leadership class, the CEO of the Society of the Chemical Industry toes the party line. There won’t even be any salt mines left to send dissenters down.
Perhaps Net Zero is just an outer wall protecting the ideology of Climate Change. It may eventually be torn down as the consequences become more widely recognised?
Perhaps the ideology of Climate Change is a second inner wall protecting the liberal idea of Utopia. It may eventually be torn down as the consequences become more widely recognised?
Perhaps the liberal idea of Utopia is the bailey protecting the privilege of the Elite and the Establishment who rather fancy being in charge of their Utopia? The bailey may eventually be torn down as the consequences become more widely recognised?
But only if the consequences can be talked about – and there are plenty of people trying to shut down free speech.
Maybe it is time for a class action against newspaper and media publishers for the damage they have caused or aided and abetted.
Industry clearly needs rejuvenating but it will require sensible political decisions to make it happen, unfortunately our politicians are idiots, wilful idiots. They need to roll back the regulations put in place over the past 40 years and just get out of the bloody way. Aligning with the EU will make matters worse because they are communists.
there are a few people in the US who have built new industries over the past few years, China and many other countries have industrialised and are thriving. Russia has rebuilt it’s economy while the EU and UK have been sinking deeper and deeper into the gutter. Whether the zealots like it or not there is a common theme. if these countries can do it then so can the UK, we need to unleash the genius of the British but that won’t happen unless the government gets out of the way. We could start as a matter of urgency get rid of the utterly useless BBC who have done so much damage over the years. We need people with vision, not the idiots of the past, the whole system needs to be reformed, it needs to be done quickly.
Britain’s deindustrialisation started in the late 1940s when the Marxist-Labour Government nationalised the economy cutting our industries off from private capital, used these businesses to give everybody a job, they became bloated, inefficient, a net drain on the Treasury (taxpayers), lacking in proper investment, ultimately declined and closed down.
The priority was the unaffordable welfare-state and NHS, funded by debt and money printing, then the disastrous entry into the EEC protectionist customs union which cut the UK off from the global economy and its traditional trading partners, stifled innovation and technological advance and forced us to trade near exclusively within the EEC.
Creative destruction: old businesses, old products, old jobs, old capital, destroyed by new – innovation, new capital input, new, better jobs.
That only works if there is “new” to replace old. When old just decays away with no new activity to replace it, we end up with nothing. This is about where we are now, with what’s left being destroyed by Net Zero.
It’s what the population has been voting for since 1945.
Harvey-Jones couldn’t do simple maths. We sold off “what we already owned” – we also sold off the huge cost of subsidising unprofitable, inefficient, businesses.
As for spending the proceeds on infrastructure – that just means the State gets rid of one Albatross round its neck and replaces it with another.
None of our infrastructure was State-funded prior to WWII, it was private money.
Yes the proceeds did get wasted in the welfare-state and NHS, but also it reduced the debt, Government spending and taxation.
Watching the Sky News video, I noticed the very concerned presenter was driving around in a Tesla. Perfect. You couldn’t make it up.
A lot of the ignorant media talked about energy costs being the main reason for the end of our steel industry but it was the use of equipment built in the 1950s that was the fundamental problem. In 70 years the technology might just have moved on a tad. When it comes to the petro-chem industry, energy costs are important but the massive imposition of regulations on the industry and layers and layers of planning rules here, and across the EU, has strangled the industry and seen a move of production to China and India, which also puts it nearer to where all our goods are manufactured. Some production has gone to the US with their now friendly business climate. When an industry goes the skill and knowledge goes with it making a return very difficult if not impossible certainly in the short term – ie one Reform term in office is not enough. As for explosive manufacture – all roads lead to the EU back in 2005. In order to cuddle up to our alleged ‘friends’ it was decided that it would be fine to import explosives and propellant from as EU country, possibly France. The lame legacy media… Read more »
Ben’s articles are always an immensely engaging read.