Virtue-signalling Britain must adapt to Trump’s re-industrialisation

Labour needs to prioritise manufacturing as a new force of nature hits global commerce

Industry is beautiful and it’s going to make America great again. That, in essence, is Donald Trump’s domestic strategy, and now he has a thumping mandate to make it happen.
“Manufacturing jobs. We’re going to get them all back. We’re going to get them all back, every single one of them,” Trump vowed at his coronation speech in July.
Trump’s return really feels like a historical moment. The era of globalisation era is over – is the era of re-industrialisation just beginning? 
We’ve come full circle since Tony Blair compared it to a force of nature. 
“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Blair told Labour’s annual conference in 2005. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” 
Resistance was futile. We had to be “prepared constantly to change to remain competitive”, and accept living in a state of neurotic insecurity, while all the important decisions were out of our control. 
The logic of de-industrialisation went like this. Since labour costs were lower in China we could lose all our factories and the refining industries, such as petrochemicals, that create the materials that the factories need. And therefore we wouldn’t need cheap energy. Following the logic to its grim conclusion, we wouldn’t really need to invest in producing a skilled, technically literate workforce either, if we could just import one for less from another country. 
The cost was ravaged communities, and tides of low quality imported junk littering our living rooms and streets. Today, even the man who coined the phrase the “End of History” in 1992 has regrets. Writing in the Financial Times last week, Francis Fukiyama agonised how “neoliberalism” … “reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change… The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity.” 
This week, Americans rejected that proposition comprehensively. A thriving industrial sector benefits all classes of society, from the PhDs designing the robots and the processes to the skilled workers operating them. Industry means prosperity, security and self-determination.
In reality, globalisation was dying before Trump dealt it a fatal blow. The arrangement required permanent peace and cooperation, but the accession of President Xi saw China turn into an aggressive superpower. The supply chain crisis that followed Covid revealed how vulnerable we were: China was supplying the tungsten for American bullets. Finally, China’s latest economic crisis has truly broken the spell.
Many offices are 40pc empty as capital and companies flee. Cities look deserted. Established names like Apple are reducing their presence, and IBM cut back its R&D operation in China in August. It got so bad that the Communist Party-owned People’s Daily ran a feature hailing “the return of Foxconn”. 
So is America up to the challenge of re-industrialising? It certainly has capital, skills and abundant natural resources. Oil is “liquid gold”, Trump reminds us: “We have it and China doesn’t.” He’s vowed to end the electric car mandate on day one. And promised “an iron dome missile defence system … built entirely in the USA.” 
But we can’t say the same for much of Western Europe, and in particular the UK. Poland is the most consistent growth story, and has retained its engineering-led culture: around one third of Polish GDP is generated by manufacturing. But elsewhere, industry-hostile policy has flourished. 
Germany is reeling from cheap imports and high energy costs, while in the UK we have the most expensive industrial electricity prices in the world, four times the cost of Mexico, Taiwan and Thailand. We’re being conditioned to accept on-demand power as a luxury, not a utility. Thanks to the posturing of Starmer and Miliband this is going to get worse. Drilling new resources will halt, putting critical sectors like pharmaceuticals and fertilisers in peril. (Gas is 90pc of the variable cost of fertiliser).
We certainly have the brains, and the practical engineering genius to turn an idea into a product: an exhausting process. Every government has vowed to support high-tech, high-value manufacturing exports, just as every administration has said apprenticeships are important. But it’s often lip service. 
Only a small handful of billion pound British manufacturing companies have emerged, such as Dyson and David McMurtry’s Renishaw.  “We have fantastic engineers but they are rarely backed,” says Marcus Gibson, whose research agency watches the SME sector.
Ideology remains our biggest obstacle. Reared on books with titles like “The Weightless World” (by Diane Coyle, 1999) or “Living On Thin Air” (Charles Leadbeater, 2000), our policy intelligentsia are like dreamers who don’t want to wake up. 
The Left are committed to climate goals that the rest of the world do not share, and after this week, are even less likely to adopt. While the Right agonises over “picking winners”, and recoils at the mention of industrial policy. It will defend open borders even if it means paving over the last field in England for low-quality housing and pylons. 
The secret of a modern re-industrial rebirth is that it creates a greener and more pleasant country. A great deal of engineering already takes place there, or on industrial estates, out of sight of the wonks. Cut red tape and taxes and let them make and trade.
Trump is a genuine force of nature, dragging the world along behind him. Our hostility to industry may be one of the first casualties. Should any remnants of UK industry survive this Labour administration, future generations may yet prosper from it.