How feasible is this?
The critical minerals initiative comes with a £50m fund to boost production at tungsten and lithium mines in Cornwall. Europe’s largest deposits of lithium are in Cornwall, and the EU singled out the county’s tungsten mine for potential financial support this summer.
Yes that should do it.
The strategy follows a six-week standoff between China and the EU over the supply of chips used in the car industry, underlining how Beijing is willing to use trade in critical materials for political purposes.
So the Dutch government attempts to sieze a Chinese company at the behest of the US and it is China’s fault.
This is the “left wing” paper of the UK. At this point I am not sure who the target audience of the Guardian is. Blairites? Are there even that many of them around in the general population?
Some minor oligarch is getting another yacht
the Guardian’s job is to tell progressive liberals what they should think. They don’t have a “target audience.” They just monopolize the “center left” media space and dress up in semi palatable prose, the fascist demands of the capitalist class.
It was more a comment that in the UK it appears the venn diagram overlap between those who purport to be against war and those who reject decolonialism is increasingly being diminished.
I have also read that social chauvinism is because of bribery not propaganda.
50 million pounds is enough to make the uk self sufficient?
No, sorry I was being facetious/sardonic against the Guardian.
When it comes to minerals mining and processing it requires significant investment from mining to refining; it requires investment in education and infrastructure and planning that requires looking at least 10-20 years into the future.
£50 million is a lot of money but it is nothing in the West because of how wasteful and inefficient any funding is used. For example, given their dogmatism with liberalism they have effectively ramped up the cost at every stage of production. It is why infrastructure projects take forever, are not completed on time, run over-budget and are all racked with quality control problems. Generally the west’s solution therefore for resource extraction is typically squeeze some country in the Global South and blame workers in the west for asking too high a wage for their rationale for this exploitation (western workers need higher wages to meet their inflated costs of living, and their quality of life is generally subsidised by the superexploitation of the Global South).
Essentially this “investment” will be nowhere near as what’s needed for self-sufficiency. The solution isn’t just to spend more money but a holistic fundamental change in running the economy where the cost at every stage of production is lowered in every sector of society (if you wanted to target a few things in particular they would be energy, education/training, food, healthcare and housing; with the aim of lowering the cost of each wage worker with the longer aim of increasing the real productive capacity) but that requires a dictatorship against capital.
We often use purchasing power parity as a means to try to actually compare what a comparable basket of goods between different countries truly is rather than just using market currency exchange rates to measure a countries wealth. However, I would argue that this still misses a big chunk of purchasing parity. I would argue we should also be comparing what it costs to build say a comparable bridge or railway in say the UK compared to China or Vietnam ie the purchasing power of paying for infrastructure.
could you maybe expand on the economic inefficiencies of liberalism part or do you maybe have further readings i could look into?
thank you for the very interesting comment id like to learn more
could you maybe expand on the economic inefficiencies of liberalism part
- generally without war there is no pressure within a capitalist economy for longer term planning between industries and all sectors of an economy working together, except for the following blip in history. After 1917-1918, the western workers threatened, using the new Soviet Union as leverage, with domestic revolution if they didn’t get concessions
- the above resulted in the welfare state - pensions, sick pay, maternity leave, child labour laws, 40 hour work week, universal health care etc etc. Effectively what we consider a modern developed economy
- a certain faction of capital agreed to the above concessions to maintain stability (and stave off socialism) but also they realised this allowed them to catch up with rapidly advancing Soviet union technology with a larger skilled workforce (eg space race, computer chips, mobile communication, internet, universal vaccination, arms etc etc).
- with the dissolution of the Soviet union in the 1980s that pressure against capital was again lost with liberalism once again having less restraints, and the ongoing decline of the west that you can see to this day
- neo-liberalism could be considered goverment intervention to maintain and create new markets though in practice it is just another form defence of capital againt a dictatorship of the proleteriat
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- with the above kept in mind, if a firm wants to obtain feeder-products down the supply chain to help make its own products then it has to pay for that product in the market - the anarchy of the market introduces transactional costs that it could do without
- so in attempt to solve the above problem a firm could buy other firms up and down the supply chain to sidestep market constraints and gain economies of scale
- but now you have a new problem, less competition, in liberal theory you need competition to drive innovation and product prices down
- so to take a crude and simple overview you have a contradiction of the anarchy of competition and lack of coordination with mulitple firms vs a vertically integrated firm with potentially no competition
- and given the above firms are all representstions of dictatorships of capital think of the lack of feedback loops in the system from the workers who actually have to make and use the above products
- now potentially apply the above to every sector that may be involved in infrastructure, from mineral extraction to road and railway building, to energy production. Think what a lack of cohesive central planning may introduce here
- we are still working within the confines of liberal theory - none of the above is actually marxist; we have not introduced value of labour, the tendancy of the rate of profit to fall, crises of captialism, the attempt to resolve domestic contradictions through imperialism etc etc
Hoped that help (that was the shortest I could make the response by focusing on one aspect of a liberal political economy and it doesn’t fully capture a marxist analysis but hopefully it is a good enough start with a bit of dialectical materialism: highlighting contradictions as engines driving change)
Thank you!
Some resources while I work out a more succinct reply later (I wrote mini-essays here and deleted them):
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Liberalism, a Counter-history by Losurdo
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Richard Wolff’s channel to be used as intro videos on youtube
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Deeper dives:
- a) Next Recession blog by Michael Roberts https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/
- b) Crisis Theory blog: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.com/
- A) https://redsails.org/concessions/
- B) https://redsails.org/roberts-harvey-law-of-value/
- C) https://redsails.org/the-modern-monetary-trick/
- Bidetmarxman on twitter
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Replace million with billion and you have a chance. Otherwise, no way.
It’s not feasible. Even under aggressive diversification scenarios, China is forecast to retain 78% of global refining capacity in 2040, only slightly down from its current position. The numbers clearly show that independence from Chinese supply chains is a multi-decade project and simply not achievable in the near term.
Furthermore, the UK can’t even produce steel anymore, how they plan to spin up a complex refining industry is frankly beyond me.
