FIAT is closing its car manufacturing plant in Sicily. There's nothing wrong with the workforce or their output but there's everything wrong with siting a major manufacturing plant on an island with poor links to the mainland, iffy levels of corruption in administration and regional government, and an underlying sociopolitical purpose to the plant being there at all, reliant upon government, regional and European Union funding which multiplies the interference with the industrial and economic objectives of FIAT's company strategies. Sergio Marchionne displays a brisk attitude to governmental political interference in his industrial planning, in Sicily or anywhere else in the world.
FIAT says the plant in Sicily is like a cathedral in the desert. It is no surprise that the Italian government, and the regional government in Sicily is offering large subsidies to any one willing to take FIAT's place as a work-provider.
This kind of government activity is precisely the waste of resources that Labour has committed in regions of the United Kingdom that have poor communications, iffy levels of corruption in administration and regional government, and an underlying sociopolitical purpose in using tax-derived funds to direct work-provision to deserts; inter alia multiplying interference in the industrial and economic strategies of those manufacturing and industrial enterprises that do struggle to exist in once important industrial zones.
Wealth from European Union regional funding, and from the UK tax-take should have been used to build infrastuctural systems, and to close down no longer viable towns and cities. Their populations would have been attracted to newer and better positioned population centres where manufacturing jobs and skill centres could have been encouraged and expanded by the use of these thrown-away resources. Instead our tax-raised wealth has been used to create not cathedrals in deserts but trapped populations of client voters whose only option is to support the hand that feeds them.
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3 comments:
hmm, fully agree with the issues of subsidies and the state attempting to prop up failing companies, but;
"....to close down no longer viable towns and cities." ?
seriously?! seems a bit harsh. I for one would be terrified of people like mandelson or tebbit deciding that my hometown had to go.
I didn't mean to deny the loveliness of many parts of the UK, Roy, any more than deny that Sicily is beautiful. But some places become inappropriate for industrial or manufacturing use. Then settlements wholly or mainly developed to house a mass working people, rather than local smaller populations in keeping with local resources, need to be demolished and rebuilt elsewhere.
Almost all the 19th and first half of the 20th century working class populations are economic migrants; now many who are left stranded high and dry are their third and fourth generation descendants kept there almost as effectively as if Labour had built a wall as realised socialist regimes did.
Labour's wall is a wall of housing rights and benefits claims. They need to 'fix' their territories and their electoral population or swathes of effectively now rural regions would abandon a 'working class' based party.
Hear hear!
Excellent post Hats.
"Labour's wall is a wall of housing rights and benefits claims."
Indeed. And don't forget the badly-designed multiply-overlapping benefits that result in extraordinary marginal tax rates (like well over 90% in some cases), and act as a permanent and very effective disincentive to do anything except stay on benefits.
You'd almost think it had been designed that way on purpose. Oh, erm, um...
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