It’s all swings and roundabouts in terms of the world economy

Above: swings and roundabouts at a village show last summer

Vauxhall Motors at Ellesmere Port announced nine hundred job losses today. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Gordon Brown) and the Trade & Industry Secretary (Alistair Darling) scuttled down there on what was obviously a PR damage limitation exercise, to make it seem that the government is taking action. In reality they will do nothing since it is all swings and roundabouts in terms of the world economy (what manufacturing jobs we will lose because we have a lightly-regulated economy will be more than compensated for by the high-skill professional jobs we will gain).

The problem is that the people on Ellesmere Port who are losing their jobs will not be candidates for the financial services or marketing or property-related jobs that are being created elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

I used to believe that globalisation would be to everyone’s benefit but increasingly I am not so sure. It looks as if a comfortable class of professionals will be spread across the globalised world, with a desperate underclass beneath them. The middle classes in India and China will rise to Western levels of wealth and prosperity, but social groups C2, D and E in the West will regress (not to third world destitution, but a lot lower than their current standards of living).

In the long run the world economy should expand so that everyone is better off, but in the long run (as Keynes pointed out) we are all going to be dead.

Because I knew people who worked at the Vauxhall works in Luton I always bought a Vauxhall car. Brand new (bought at Shaw & Kilburn), always Vauxhall, always painted blue. But when the Luton works closed I stopped buying Vauxhall cars and bought an Alfa Romeo (it was only loyalty that kept me buying from Vauxhall so long).