Corus chief calls for big spending push in UK

Britain should shrug off worries about its huge government deficit and prepare to spend "tens of billions of pounds" on infrastructure investment to push the economy out of recession, according to one of the UK's leading industrialists.

Kirby Adams, chief executive of Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steel maker, also said the UK needed to draw up a "real industrial policy" that would make the country more attractive for manufacturers.

I'd stress that should be a Green New Deal, but this is worth blogging: it shows the truth that a few in business realise -that without government created demand we're in for a very tough time indeed.

Just tell George Osborne someone.

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4 Responses

nick james says:

December 29 2009 at 3:37 am

Really? Mega steel looking down the wrong end of a gun and /immediately/ resort (like the banks) to the tax payers’ teat?

Truly a deathbed conversion on the part of our red in tooth and claw efficient private sector operators: they should be hung out to dry just as the banks should have been hung out to dry.

William Keegan nailed it (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/27/banking-banks) “The banks say they are worried about the credit ratings of the countries that have been rescuing them.” Soon we’ll have steel companies saying we can’t afford new railways.

Presumably a “real industrial policy” would involve large subsidies to the private sector? I mean, isn’t it time for some of that entrepreneurial risk taking, of which we’ve heard so much over the last 20+ years?
Carol Wilcox says:

December 29 2009 at 1:31 pm

Any business which has to be bailed out for public benefit by the taxpayer should be nationalised until such point that it can be restructured into a workers’ co-operative. That’s what they should have done with Vestas. In the case of banks, they would require probably more restructuring than is practical for them to be handed back to the private sector.

However, things are as they are now and, whether or not Corus would benefit from the recommended policy, public investment in infrastructure is one of the best ways to beat the recession. If an annual land value tax were also introduced, the whole thing would be self-funding since useful infrastructure investment feeds directly into local land values.
Alex says:

December 29 2009 at 9:28 pm

Carol Wilcox :Any business which has to be bailed out for public benefit by the taxpayer should be nationalised until such point that it can be restructured into a workers’ co-operative. That’s what they should have done with Vestas. In the case of banks, they would require probably more restructuring than is practical for them to be handed back to the private sector.
However, things are as they are now and, whether or not Corus would benefit from the recommended policy, public investment in infrastructure is one of the best ways to beat the recession. If an annual land value tax were also introduced, the whole thing would be self-funding since useful infrastructure investment feeds directly into local land values.

Vestas didn’t have to be bailed out. They packed their bags and went elsewhere because they were fed up with a combination of the UK planning process and the ridiculous Renwables Obligation Certificates schemes on which their UK business depended. If the UK government had looked at how things had worked successfully in the rest of Europe, Vestas would still be in the UK and the UK would have one of the largest portfolios of wind farms in Europe (Oh, and Vestas is a Danish company, which makes it hard to nationalise the UK manufacturing subsidiary when they don’t own the intellectual property).

The comment from Corus is a bit rich when only 2 weeks ago they shut down the Redcar plant because the carbon credits from stopping business were worth more than the value of the ongoing business, particularly when the parent Tata Steel switched production to new plant in India constructed with finance from western countries provided under the Clean development Mechanism.
linda kaucher says:

December 30 2009 at 12:22 pm

UK engineering construction workers are fighting to be employed on infrastructure projects, as EU rules and European Court of Justice decisions facilitate EU and overseas firms bringing in own labour, cheap. The latest fight is to have workers in on auditing the books of foreign firms to see what they are actully paying the workers they bring in; they are currently being excluded from this process.

It is notable that those who have been effective shop stewards are particularly excluded from employment – effective blacklisting. There needs to be attention to employment issues, including who will benefit before there is any more ‘fiscal stimulus’ of the spending kind.