Yes, coal mining was worth saving. Now we buy coal from foreigners. Who makes the money?

Say it cost British Steel £500 to extract a ton of iron ore, and £100 for a US mine (for a comparable amount of iron out). And say it cost British Coal £1000 for the coal to smelt the iron ore, whereas a US strip-mine would cost £200. Then the same amount of steel would cost five times as much if produced in the UK as produced in the US.

You could make this work if you wanted - but only by going the North Korea route and banning all imports from abroad. The moment you get imports from abroad, the vastly cheaper cost of raw materials shows up how much it's costing you to dig this stuff out.

To continue the same argument, we should maintain cotton plantations in the UK too for our clothing. OK, they'd need to go under vast greenhouses, and they'd take huge quantities of water and heating, so the simple cotton T-shirt you'd buy down the market would probably cost you a hundred quid. But we'd be self-sufficient, and that's the important thing, right?

Yes, British Leyland was worth saving. Now we buy cars from foreigners. Who makes the money?

Who "made" money on BL? The government spent a bloody fortune trying to prop them up, because they made a loss for ages! Why? Because what they were selling was unmitigated crap. What was the effect of the government propping them up? They assumed they had a right to exist and continued to churn out even shoddier cars at even higher prices, ignoring any thought of efficiency or build quality, until no-one in their right mind would buy one and the cost to keep the whole crumbling pile aloft was too much. A house of cards? I give you BL as the classic, all-time example.

Graham.