What unspeakable tosh! What is actually draining the nation's wealth is a bunch of greedy so-called business people who have no idea whatsoever how to run a long term, healthy business and are asset stripping the country for the short term gain of themselves and their mates. As Britain discovered during the war, being able to supply your own country with the basics of survival is very important, exports are great to provide extra income, but if you rely on imports for the basics, you are soon in deep trouble if an emergency arises. On our trip to the seaside today, I noticed a new 'solar farm' being erected near Bristol - great, for our energy independence and ecology, not so great, when you realise it is being erected on good farming land, that could be grazing animals or growing fruit or vegetables. Why are we importing low quality, tasteless food from abroad (which is superficially 'cheap' but of dubious nutritional, environmental and taste quality) when we have fed ourselves well, and deliciously, from our own farms for centuries, until very recently? Because it's not profitable for those who are already so financially wealthy they've lost all contact with reality, that's why.
Some of our greatest British companies, such as Cadbury, Fry, Rowntree, now, sadly asset stripped to multinationals for the benefit of said wealthy fools, started out, not to garner wealth, but to benefit the people of this country. All those famous 'chocolate' names were companies started by Quakers, to try and create an alternative to alcohol and pubs, in a time when alcohol had become just as serious a problem, if not worse, than 'binge drinking' today. The intent was to create places to meet and socialise without alcohol, and to make chocolate fashionable instead! They treated their workers well, valuing their contribution to the business to the extent of building top quality housing and communities for them, with schools etc, rather than the squalid 'back to backs' most of the other workers of the industrial revolution were stuck in. These employers also cared for their elderly workers, instead of tossing them into the workhouse. These business methods created multinational businesses, only when they ceased to be family businesses, cleaving to moral principles did they deteriorate into mere money creators.
Our worldwide economies today are run by gamblers, playing with other people's money and lives to generate short term profits for themselves - the losses always fall on those whose money they have been gambling with, never their own. This isn't just bankers, this is the many multinationals on the stock market - they are gambling with the money and lives of their workers and customers, not their shareholders, the shareholders are pulling the strings. Only when we cease to buy the ideas, values and goods of the merely financially wealthy and greedy will we change this set up - and it IS a set up, and we are the fall guys.
If they won't think long term, and they won't, for our own sakes WE must. We cannot have a 'fortress' at all when we have sold vast swathes of it to China, America and heaven knows where else. We have sold of most of our independence already, willy nilly, because those running our country are financial and social illiterates. We, the people, need to take our country back, by being VERY conscious of where the money we spend goes, by supporting small, local businesses, by building community. If we have community, and stand together, we are greater than those who would harvest us as 'Stock' (yes, that's how the DWP, for instance, refer to us, the citizens of this country)
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