Global trade little comfort

Pouring molten metal into moulds is a craft which has been part of Black Country life since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Today, yet another iron-making plant has fallen silent. We report on the last day’s work at Clancey, in Cradley, where dozens of jobs have been lost.

The last castings were made yesterday. The machines will be switched off for the last time a week before Christmas.

And another little chapter will be ended in the mighty volume of bad news tracing the industrial decline of the Black Country.

The industries, crafts and skills which made this region world-famous are vanishing before our eyes. It is unspeakably sad.

This is the human, financial and emotional price we pay for globalisation. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown may rub their hands with glee at the cheap goods from foreign firms, and the low inflation they produce.

Maybe they and their colleagues would not be so cheerful if their own jobs were being taken by foreign competition.

But there’s no danger of that. The jobs being lost in Britain are not those of ministers or public-sector penpushers but of working-class men and women who could never compete with starvation wages and sweatshop conditions.

What hope for a skilled metal-caster in Cradley when a teenager in far-off China will work twice the hours for a tenth of the pay in a foundry drenched in toxic fumes?

So what is the difference between globalisation and unfair competition?

Don’t expect anyone in Whitehall to answer. When a politician develops global vision, he tends to ignore things right under his own nose.

Cameron must do better than this

When is David Cameron going to stop talking like a charity campaigner and start delivering a few Conservative policies?

Today he is in familiar hand-wringing mode, denouncing poverty as “a moral disgrace” and promising to fix it.

This is a fatuous promise. Because poverty is measured as a percentage of average wages, it is not so much a moral disgrace as a mathematical certainty. In other words, as the Bible puts it, the poor will always be with us.

The traditional Tory response to social injustice is not to embark on social engineering but to make the national cake bigger, in order that all will benefit. That means more jobs, lower taxes, bigger incentives.

These are the policies David Cameron should be espousing. Instead, he comes across as a pale-blue version of Gordon Brown.

Mr Cameron’s party, the party of Disraeli, Macmillan and Thatcher, surely deserves better than this.