Meet the Tory donors: Samworth Brothers

Introduction to the series

This is the first article in a new series called "Meet the Tory donors". Several years ago I wrote a lengthy article providing information on a whole host of Tory donors and how they were being lavished with Peerages, handed huge chunks of the NHS and our education system and even given the opportunity to write new employment legislation for the Tory party to enact! I didn't have anything like as many subscribers back then, and in all honesty the article was so long and dispiriting to read, I'm not surprised that it didn't get shared all that much.

The idea of this new series is to break down the relationship between the Tory party and their donors into more manageable pieces by dealing with them one at a time.

Number One: Samworth Brothers Ltd

Samworth Brothers Ltd is a Leicestershire and Cornwall based food manufacturer. Their most notable products include the Ginsters Pasty range, Walkers Melton Mowbray pork pies and Soreen malt loaf.

Director Mark Samworth has donated at least £585,000 to the Tory party since 2010, including direct donations to the Tory MPs Ken Clarke (£10,000) and Alan Duncan (£7,500).

Life president of the company David Samworth has donated £26,000 to the Tories including another £7,000 in direct donations to Tory MP Alan Duncan.

The company itself also made £32,000 worth of donations to the Tory party between 2002 and 2003.

School privatisation
 
David Samworth is one of an extraordinary number of Tory party donors to have got a nice juicy slice of the publicly funded education system for himself. Unusually he was handed his slice of the education system by Tony Blair's Labour government, long before the Tories put Labour's crackpot academisation scheme into overdrive (with the end goal of the forced privatisation of every state school in England by 2022).

The Samworth Enterprise Academy in Leicester has it's own onsite church(!), but in terms of teaching, it's a devastating failure for the kids who are unlucky enough to end up there. In June 2015 Ofsted classified the school as "inadequate in almost all areas". 

It must suit David Samworth perfectly that the Tory party that he and his family donate so much to are setting up such an unaccountable system, where parents and local councils have no mechanisms to hold the private owners of desperately failing schools like the Samworth Enterprise Academy to account. In the end the only people with the power to eject the owners of failing schools will be the Tory government, who in this case and many others are bankrolled by the very people they're supposed to be overseeing! 

Labour disputes

It's pretty obvious that the Samworths are ideological Tories from the fact that they've poured well over £600,000 into Tory party coffers over the last couple of decades, but their treatment of their labour force provides proof of the fact that they share the Tory ideological contempt towards ordinary working people too.

A serious labour dispute at Samworth Brothers arose when the company sent out-of-the-blue letters to their Midlands workforce of around 4,000 people informing them that the company is planning to begin unilaterally scrapping overtime payments for work on weekends and on bank holidays.

The owners of the company plan to phase out overtime completely by 2020, because as far as they're concerned, work on a Sunday or on a Bank Holiday is exactly the same as work during the normal working week.

This idea that working at unsociable hours and on public holidays is undeserving of more compensation than ordinary weekday work is a very Tory concept indeed.

Take the dispute with the junior doctors that Jeremy Hunt has manufactured in order to push the NHS deeper into crisis. One of the many objections to Hunt's new contract (beyond the primary one that the new contract represents a threat to public safety) is the way that the Tories are trying to redefine chunks of the evening and weekend as sociable hours in order to avoid paying doctors overtime. As far as Jeremy Hunt and the Tories are concerned, for doctors Saturday is a weekday and working at half past nine on a Saturday evening deserves no more pay than working on a weekday morning (which is awfully hypocritical given that Parliament never sits at a weekend and MPs "late sitting" expenses kick in at 7.30!).

Another example of the Tories attacking the weekend is their failed attempt in March 2016 to redefine the Sunday Trading laws in favour of larger shops.

It's absolutely clear that the people running this company are ideological Tories, and that an awful lot of people who buy their products are inadvertently funding the Tory party and their class war agenda.

Offshore ownership structure

The parent company of the Samworth Brothers group is called SFH Investments Unlimited and is registered in the tax haven of Jersey.

Products

• Ginsters (pasties and pies)
• Soreen (malt loaf)
• Walkers and Son (producer of 80% of all Melton Mowbray pies)
• Melton Foods (sandwich supplier)
• Bradgate bakery (sandwiches and salads)
• Blueberry Foods (cake and desert supplier to Tesco and M&S)
• Brooksby Foods (ready meals)
• Kettleby Foods (pies/ready meals)
• Saladworks (ready meals)
• Dickenson and Morris (Ye Olde Pie Shoppe in Melton Mowbray)
• Sci-MX (protein supplements)
• Tamar Foods (pastry supplier to M&S, Tesco, Co-op, Waitrose)
• Walkers Deli (meat products)
• Walkers Sausage Co
• Kensey Foods (desserts including some in the Cadburys range under licence)

What we can do 
  
The obvious course of action is to boycott their products, but if you do decide to do this it's absolutely vital that you contact the company to explain why you won't be buying their products, because the worst way you can hit people like this is to hit them in their wallets.

If tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people begin boycotting Samworth Brothers products then the company might notice a dip in sales and profits, but if tens of thousands of people send the company emails to explain why they are boycotting the company, they'll actually know why their fall in profits is happening.

Here are some contact details:

Samworth Brothers (contact form)
Ginsters Pasties (email, Facebook, Twitter)
Soreen (contact form, Facebook, Twitter)

A properly written email is most likely to have an effect within the company, and posting links or either of these infographics (Ginsters + Soreen) on their Facebook pages are likely to create the biggest social media reaction.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Bernie Sanders was right about Panama

The leak of the Panama Papers has vindicated Bernie Sanders stance against tax-dodging. In 2011 Sanders strongly criticised the Panama Free Trade agreement while his rival for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination Hillary Clinton voted in favour of the Panama free trade agreement.

Here's what he said to Congress on October 12th 2011.

"Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade US taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. The Panama free trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and in other countries." [source]

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton not only voted for the Panama free trade agreement, she also publicly advocated it, and congratulated President Obama when the deal was passed saying "these initiatives are the leading edge of a job-creating trade agenda that will open markets, level the playing field for our businesses and workers, and champion America’s working families in an age of tough global competition".

The confidence with which Clinton celebrated this deal with one of the most notorious tax havens in the world is staggering. As Bernie Sanders pointed out during his speech opposing the deal, the Panamanian economy is only 0.2% of the size of the US economy, so anyone talking up a free trade agreement between the two countries in terms of being some kind of jobs bonanza is clearly being disingenuous. As for the bits about "levelling the playing field" and "championing working families" they're utterly absurd black=white assertions. How on earth is a trade agreement with a notorious tax haven where wealthy US citizens and corporations stash their ill-gotten gains good for ordinary working families?

After the initial furore over the high profile politicians implicated in the Panama Papers had died down, the media team who are carefully stage-managing the release of information quietly announced some of the first American names in the Mosack Fonseca client list which included:

• Robert Miracle (convicted fraudster)
• Benjamin Wey (indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015)
• Igor Olenicoff (found guilty of stashing $200m in offshore accounts in 2007)
• Anthony J. Gumbiner (guilty of SEC fraud in the 1980s)
• John Michael 'Red' Crim (found guilty of a $10m tax fraud in 2008)
• Jonathan Kaplan (found guilty in 2007 of accepting a $400,000 commercial bribe) 

It's astonishing that back in 2011 Hillary Clinton used such misleading language to celebrate a free trade deal with an economy that provides a bolt hole for criminals like those listed above to stash the ill-gotten gains they've ripped off from American working families (either directly through fraud, or indirectly by dodging their taxes meaning either services have to be cut, or other American citizens have to make up the shortfall).

It's also worth noting that the vast majority of Republicans (in Congress and in the Senate) supported Barack Obama's Panama free trade agreement, while the bulk of the limited opposition in both houses came from Democrats.

Here is what Bernie Sanders had to say after the Panama Papers came out:

"I was opposed to the Panama Free Trade Agreement from day one. I predicted that the passage of this disastrous trade deal would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore. I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.  

My opponent [Hillary Clinton], on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster.

The American people are sick and tired of establishment politicians who say one thing during a campaign and do the exact opposite the day after the election. “It is time for real change. As president, I will use my authority to terminate the Panama Free Trade Agreement within six months. My administration will conduct an immediate investigation into U.S. banks, corporations and wealthy individuals who have been stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes. If any of them have violated U.S. law, my administration will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law."

In stark contrast to the empty tough-talking rhetoric about tax-dodging from UK Prime Minister David Cameron, it's possible to actually believe Bernie Sanders is serious about confronting the problem because he's got an actual track record of opposing tax-dodging, and opposing free trade deals with notorious tax haven economies.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Are you gullible enough to believe the Tory rhetoric on tax-dodging?

In 2012 David Cameron reacted to the tax-dodging activities of the comedian Jimmy Carr by saying that "Tax-dodging is morally wrong", in May 2013 he said that he was "opposed to all aggressive tax avoidance", in April 2016 when the Panama Papers were leaked he said that offshore tax secrecy is "not morally acceptable", yet in the six years his government have been in power, nothing serious has been done to stop it.

If you are the kind of gullible person who takes the words of politicians at face value without engaging your critical judgement you might imagine that the Tories are sincere, and that they have actually been clamping down on the tax-dodging activities of multinational corporations and the super-wealthy minority, but you'd be completely wrong. They've made a few token gestures, but under David Cameron's watch only one out of the 1,000+ people caught up in the Swiss HSBC tax-dodging scandal has faced prosecution and multinational corporations have continued to get away with shifting their UK profits overseas in order to avoid paying tax here.

The Tories know that the tax-dodging activities of corporations and the super-rich are an issue that the public feel very strongly about, but they've assumed that the general public are so gullible that they'll simply believe it if the Tories do nothing more than say that they're getting tough on tax-dodging, whilst simultaneously benefiting from tax-dodging themselves, and even actively facilitating the tax-dodging activities of others.

In this article I'm going to give a few examples that prove that Tory party statements on tax-dodging are just empty rhetoric and deliberate misdirection.

David Cameron

David Cameron is a direct beneficiary of tax-dodging as a result of inheriting £300,000 from his father, which was made via a network of offshore "investment funds" in places like Panama and Geneva, which were explicitly designed to help wealthy people avoid paying UK tax. [source]

Samantha Cameron

David Cameron's wife works for Smythson, which is a leather goods and luxury stationary company that is based in Luxembourg for the purposes of avoiding tax, and controlled via a network of other shell companies based in the British tax havens of Jersey and Guernsey. [source]

Eton college

David Cameron was educated at the most elitist private school in the United Kingdom, which charges more than the average annual wage in tuition fees (currently £34,500 per year). What many people don't realise is that since November 2010 this elitist training camp for the children of the establishment is registered as a charity for the purpose of avoiding tax.

Gary Barlow

Within a week of David Cameron publicly condemning the tax-dodging activities of Jimmy Carr, he absolutely refused to make a similar public condemnation of the former Take That member Gary Barlow when it was revealed that he too had been using an elaborate scheme to avoid paying UK tax. It hardly seems like a coincidence that Gary Barlow is a very high profile Tory party supporter. [source]

British tax havens

Several of the biggest tax havens in the world are British Crown dependencies and overseas territories (Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man ...). If the UK government had been serious they could have forced these places to clean up their acts any time in the last six years, but they choose not to, presumably because they're actually happy that the super-wealthy global elite choose to stash their ill-gotten gains in British territories rather than in non-British ones.

The City of London

London is indisputably the global capital of the tax avoidance industry. If an individual or corporate entity want to avoid paying tax in whatever jurisdiction, there's always plenty of London tax lawyers to advise them on how to set up the chain of shell companies they need in order to make their wealth "evaporate" and reappear in some secretive offshore bank account. This industry exists to service the selfishness of the super-rich. They help the super-rich avoid paying tax, then take a slice of that money for themselves in fees. The idea of David Cameron and the Tories clamping down on the tax avoidance industry is laughable because the Tory party take huge amounts in donations from the beneficiaries of such services.

HSBC

Not only do HSBC have a track record of helping wealthy UK citizens dodge paying their tax, they've also ripped off their own customers with the PPI fraud, rigged the Libor and Forex markets, channelled funds to terrorist organisations and laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for murderous Mexican drug cartels.

David Cameron has numerous links to HSBC. Not only have the holders of HSBC Swiss accounts donated £5 million to the Tory party, but Cameron also handed the former HSBC boss Stephen Green a place in the unelected House of Lords and appointed him as the Trade and Investment minister. In February 2015 when the HSBC tax-dodging scandal reignited, Cameron refused to answer a simple question about whether he had ever discussed HSBC tax-dodging with Stephen Green four times in a single debate.

HMRC cuts

One of the things that really puts the Tory rhetoric on combating tax-dodging into perspective is the fact that they have ruthlessly cut the number of HMRC staff working to recover tax from high net worth individuals. Not only does this totally undermine their "tough on tax-dodging" rhetoric, it's also a display of economic illiteracy because cutting the jobs of tax investigators who recover far more than their salaries in unpaid tax each year is almost the definition of a false economy. [source]

Tax-dodging Lords

Since coming to power in 2010 David Cameron has handed out peerages to a whole load of Tory party donors. Several of these wealthy Tory donors that Cameron has stuffed into the unelected and anti-democratic House of Lords are tax-dodgers.

One of the most notable examples of Cameron's unelected tax-dodging Lords is Stanley Fink, who at first threatened to sue Ed Miliband for saying that he had avoided tax, only to change his tune and admit that he had been dodging tax, but that it was Okay because it was only "vanilla" tax avoidance, that it is "normal in British society" because "everyone does it". [source]

New tax-loopholes

Despite harping on about how much they oppose tax-dodging, the Tories have actually opened up a number of new tax loopholes for the benefit of British businesses seeking to avoid paying tax. One of the most egregious of these new loopholes was a scheme announced in the 2013 budget to allow British companies to avoid paying tax in 3rd world countries by shifting their profits into tax havens.

Distracting public attention

  
Instead of taking the revelations about the Tory Party accepting millions of pounds in funding from tax-dodgers, David Cameron desperately tried to distract attention away from the scandal by announcing social security sanctions for benefits claimants who are deemed by the state to be overweight.
There is a damn good reason that the Tory party and the right-wing press love to fixate on people like benefits claimants and immigrants as if they're the biggest problems in society instead of dealing with the bankers who wrecked the economy, the corporate fat cats who are enriching themselves at a faster rate than ever whilst contributing to the longest sustained decline in wages since records began, and the tax-dodgers who cost the country tens of billions a year by hiding their wealth in offshore accounts.

Conclusion

The reason that the Tories are always so keen to distract attention away from the much more serious problem of tax-dodging is that the people responsible are David Cameron's donors. They are the people that the Tory party exists in order to serve. There's absolutely no way that David Cameron could turn on his wealthy paymasters, even if he wanted to. All Cameron and the Tories can do is spout some tough talking rhetoric on tax-dodging, then use the Lynton Crosby tactic of throwing a dead cat on the table in order to distract public attention away from the issue.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Panama Papers

The leaked Mossack Fonseca "Panama Papers" contain some 11 million documents. That's over 2 terabytes of data, yet the way the information has been released has allowed much of the mainstream press to immediately fixate their coverage upon enemies of the west, especially Vladimir Putin, whilst including little or no information on the involvement of major western corporations and American politicians, or information on the deep British involvement in the scandal.  

The "corporate media gatekeepers"  

In an article entitled "Corporate media gatekeepers protect western 1% from Panama leak" the anti-corruption blogger Craig Murray points out that: "whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance ...Unfortunately [they] made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results".

In his blog post Murray goes on to reveal that the leak is being managed by an entity named "The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists" which despite its grandiose name is hardly an unbiased independent organisation, being funded as it it by entities like the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the W K Kellogg Foundation,The Sigrid Rausing Trust (the Tetrapak empire) and the Addesium Foundation (George Soros).

It's clear that an organisation that is heavily funded by foundations belonging to US based corporate billionaires have been cherry-picking the data and selectively releasing what they choose to. If you visit the ICIJ page detailing the leaks it turns out that they don't list a single US leader, politician or public official as being involved in the scandal!

The way that the initial leaks have been handled means that the focus of the mainstream media coverage has primarily been aimed at enemies of the West (especially Vladimir Putin), with most of the rest of the coverage focusing on government and public officials and their families from an assortment of countries, very few of them western countries.

The mainstream coverage of the leak has uniformly failed to point out that the main clients of businesses like Mossack Fonseca are corporations and corporate executives establishing networks of offshore shell companies. Still, it hardly seems like a surprise that an investigative team massively funded by the US based foundations belonging to corporate billionaires is not directing their focus on American involvement, or the massive web of corporate shell companies.

British involvement

Another factor to consider is the British complicity in all of this. Of course there is the headline grabbing detail that David Cameron's dad was involved, but then it's been public knowledge that David Cameron's dad Ian was a tax-dodger and that David Cameron inherited part of his dad's tax-dodging fortune for years. However the much bigger story is that over half of the 300,000 Mossack Fonseca clients are registered in British administered tax havens.

It also turns out that the UK is second most common country in which intermediaries operate (after the former British colony of Hong Kong) and that by far the most common jurisdiction of incorporation for corporate entities involved with Mossack Fonseca is the British dependency of the British Virgin Islands, accounting for more than half of the total.

David Cameron's response to the leak of the Panama Papers was to spout a bit more empty tough-talking rhetoric and to talk up a summit on tax secrecy in May.

It would take an extraordinary amount of gullibility to believe the bluff and bluster from the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne when it comes to their tough talking rhetoric on tax-dodging, when the Tory party receives millions in donations from tax-dodging individuals and corporations and is led by a guy who inherited his family fortune from his tax-dodging father!

London is indisputably the global capital of the tax avoidance industry and many of the biggest tax havens the global super-rich use to stash an estimated £21 trillion+ are British dependencies like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands and the Isle of Man. and the Tory party is heavily bankrolled by the City of London financial sector that has built up a lucrative trade in hiding people's cash overseas.

The idea of a Tory like David Cameron organising a summit on combating tax secrecy is like a fox organising a summit on ensuring chicken safety.

Obvious targets
 

Somehow there isn't a single US politician or official in the ICIJ list, but there are a few sacrificial lambs from other western countries. Interestingly, almost all of them have already been publicly exposed as having offshore business interests or being outright corrupt.

• David Cameron's deceased father (exposed as a tax-dodger years ago)
• Michael Ashcroft (who got to sit in the House of Lords for over a decade despite being a tax-exile)
• Jérôme Cahuzac (a disgraced French politician who is on trial for tax fraud)
• Pilar de Borbón (a member of the Spanish royal family that has been embroiled in one corruption scandal after another for years)
• Micaela Domecq Solís-Beaumont (the wife of the agriculture minister in easily the most corrupt Spanish government since the fall of General Franco)

It's pretty amazing that practically the only western politician to get named in this scandal who doesn't already have some kind of dodgy background is the Prime Minister of Iceland.

What's still to come?

It's worth pointing out that there is still an awful lot of information to be released, so it's entirely possible that the ICIJ team could play it out like the Snowden leaks with a gradual drip-feed of damning revelations stretching out for months. An optimist might expect some actual revelations about US politicians at some point and some damning details on the corporations that make up the majority of the company's client base.

Conclusion

It doesn't matter how optimistic you are about future revelations, the complete lack of information on corrupt US officials in the original tranche of leaks is deeply suspicious, as is the lack of detail on the corporations and corporate executives that make up most of the Mossack Fonseca client base.

Directing so much attention towards enemies of the west (with just a small selection of extremely obvious targets in the west) the ICIJ have helped much of the UK mainstream media to frame to debate on this tax-dodging scandal as being some kind of foreign problem, rather than a problem that the British establishment, British overseas territories, and no doubt a lot of British corporations, are deeply involved in.

Whether facilitating the mainstream media framing of the debate like this was done intentionally or not, because of the way it's been presented it's given an awful lot of British people an excuse to shrug the whole lot off as largely foreign corruption, when British overseas territories are at the very heart of it..

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Tories (not China) are the real villains in the steel crisis

It's clear to anyone who understands rudimentary economics that the root cause of the ongoing UK steel industry crisis is the glut of artificially cheap state-subsidised steel flowing out of China.

Given this fact it would be easy to paint the Chinese as the villains, but actually they're not. The Chinese are only actually doing what's in their own national interest. The Tories are the villains because they're blatantly not working towards Britain's national interests.

China's national interest

The Chinese economy has been booming for decades, but in recent years their astonishing rate of economic growth has slowed significantly. Of course annual GDP growth of 6% plus is inconceivable in the UK (2% growth mainly built on the back of mass immigration is enough to get Tories gleefully slapping themselves on the back), but it represents a big slowdown from the 10% they were averaging between the late 1980s and the global financial sector insolvency crisis.

This slowdown means that the largely state-planned Chinese economy has been left with an a much higher steel production capacity than their economy has demand for, which leaves them with a choice. They can either significantly reduce their steel output, or they can subsidise their steel industry then flood the global market with under-priced steel.

To put this choice into perspective it's important to get an idea of the size of Chinese steel production. In the 1960s and '70s the UK steel industry was bigger than China's, but since then Chinese steel production has grown 63 fold to produce almost half of the entire world output of steel (882 million metric tonnes) while UK steel production has gradually declined. The UK steel industry now produces just 1.3% of the steel that China's does.

If the Chinese government were to immediately slow down steel production it would clearly come at the cost of tens of thousands of Chinese jobs, which makes the alternative of continuing production and flooding the global market look like a better option.

An additional benefit to the Chinese is that by over-producing steel and dumping it at below cost price on the global market, they can cripple foreign steel producers in any areas that fail to impose import tariffs out of adherence to radical free-market dogma.

It's obviously in China's best interests to keep their factories churning out steel and actively increasing their dominance in the global steel market by eliminating competition, because once the competition is gone, the Chinese will be able to jack up the price, and the countries that let their steel industries die will just have to pay the price that China dictate.

What the Chinese are doing is obviously not good for the UK steel industry, but who can blame the Chinese government for adopting an industrial strategy that is beneficial to China?

Tory treachery

At the back end of 2015 the Tories were busy sucking up to China and bribing them to build our energy infrastructure for us, while the UK steel industry was in crisis. 3,000 jobs were lost in Redcar in the north east, which has been a massive blow to the local community with severely detrimental knock on effects in all kinds of other sectors of the economy too (the supply chain, transport, catering, childcare, the leisure industry ...).

Since then the Tories have only made things worse. In February 2016 the Tories successfully torpedoed an EU plan to increase tariffs on dumped Chinese steel. Now they are flat out refusing to consider nationalisation of the strategically vital UK steel industry (which would cost a fraction of 1% of the cost of the bankers' bailouts).

Even if such an ideological no-nationalisation stance comes at the cost of destroying tens of thousands of British jobs, the Tories are determined to stick to it because they value their radical right-wing ideology way above things like British workers, British communities and having some kind of coherent long-term British industrial strategy.

There are two potential reasons that the Tories are actively working against the interests of the UK steel industry. One is that they are so wedded to their radical right-wing free market dogma that they'll gladly sacrifice the UK steel industry on the altar of Laissez-faire capitalism. The other is even worse: It's the theory that they're so desperate to suck up to the Chinese that they're prepared to allow the ruination of the British steel industry in order to seek favours from the Communist Chinese government (like continued backing for their absurd nuclear price-fixing shenanigans at Hinkley Point C for example)

Adherence to radical free-market dogma at the expense of British industry, or making a sacrifice of the UK steel industry in order to curry favour with the Chinese - whatever the case it's clearly disgustingly treacherous stuff from the Tories.

Protectionism

While the Tories were shooting down EU measures to impose import tariffs on dumped Chinese steel, the Americans have been putting big import tariffs up in order to protect their own steel industry from artificially cheap Chinese imports. A lot of British people tend to think of America as being far more right-wing than the UK, but the Tories really are the most fanatically right-wing bunch of all because they'd rather have the UK steel industry ruined under a tide of cheap Chinese steel than ever consider policies like protectionism or nationalisation.

To the Tories "protectionism" is a dirty word because it conflicts with their radical free-market ideology, but a cursory look at the economic history books reveal that the most successful countries in terms of GDP growth have usually been the most protectionist.

From the early industrial revolution until the mid-19th Century the UK was a deeply protectionist economy and they built the biggest trade empire in the history of the World. From the mid-19th Century to the mid-20th Century the US was deeply protectionist while the UK embraced free-market economics. The Americans rose to become the richest and most powerful nation on Earth while Britain dropped several rungs down the global pecking order. From the late 20th Century to the present China has risen from a backwards agrarian economy to become an economic superpower that is indisputably the workshop of the world. And guess what ... China is currently one of the most protectionist economies in the world.

The idea that protectionism is harmful is one of the most backward bits of right-wing economic dogma of all.

Cameron's payback

Since the Tories took sole power in 2015 it's been one scandal, PR disaster or U-turn after another, but the way Cameron and Osborne's so-called special relationship with the Communist Party of China has unravelled is perhaps the biggest embarrassment of all.

After doing everything in their power to prevent the EU from raising import tariffs on artificially cheap Chinese steel in order to curry favour with their Communist "special partners", the Chinese repaid this Tory loyalty to China's economic interests by ... erm ... imposing a 46% import tariff on Welsh steel just as the UK steel industry crisis was coming to boiling point with the Indian company Tata announcing their decision to abandon all of their UK operations!

If it wasn't such a serious issue with so many tens of thousands of jobs at stake, this sheer level of Tory ineptitude would be laughable.

Conclusion

It's irrational to blame China for acting in their own economic interest. What is completely unacceptable though is that the Tories have allowed this steel industry crisis to go from bad to worse. They sacrificed 3,000 jobs in Redcar in the winter of 2015 and then continued fighting against the interests of the UK steel industry by torpedoing the EU move to increase tariffs on Chinese steel dumping in February 2016.

Even when the entire UK steel industry has gone into meltdown, top Tories had to be shamed into giving up their jollies in Lanzarote and Australia to come back and pretend that they give a damn about the UK steel industry.

Their response is absolutely pathetic, and the 11 million people (24% of registered voters) who voted the Tory party into absolute power in 2015 really should be ashamed of supporting such a bunch of hopeless charlatans.
   

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