SOLIDARITY FOREVER...FOR A WHILE, ANYWAY...AT LEAST UNTIL THE MEETING IS OVER

Ryton workers have a better future than French brothers (Boris Johnson, The Telegraph, April 20th, 2006)

It was in 1864 that Karl Marx stood up in London and announced that the hour of the international proletariat was at hand. If only they could see their common class interest, he raved, the workers could unite across frontiers, dispossess the bosses, and throw off their shackles.

As we all know, Marx was completely wrong. So strong was the feeling of national particularism that, far from uniting, the workers of the world spent much of the next century slaughtering each other. Indeed, the international proletariat has consistently shown that it is loyal to family, community, factory, country - but never to the international proletariat.

The workers of France and Spain will not go on strike for the workers of Ryton, for the simple prudential reason that they know that international capital will always be able to relocate, just as Peugeot itself is building a new factory in Slovakia and global manufacturing is moving to China, and whatever their sympathies for families in Coventry, the workers of France will feel that their first duty is to themselves and their families.

Now put like that it sounds cruel and ruthless; and yet what Marx also failed to understand was that this capitalist system was, in fact, the best available protection for the interests of the working man, since it is this very flexibility of labour, and mobility of capital, that allows new jobs to be created and all the joy and excitement of industrial innovation.

It is frankly rubbish to say that the Ryton closure is a "body blow" to British manufacturing, or even to the British motor-car industry. The amazing truth is that this supposedly services-obsessed economy is currently producing about 1.6 million cars a year - almost an all-time record, and far more than were being produced in the 1970s.

Look at Land Rover, free from the ossification of its design, now going through the biggest sales boom in its history. Look at those wonderful new Minis - brilliant, burly, bustling scarabs - most of them made by the ingenious workforce of south Oxfordshire. The German parent company is planning to pump in another ££100 million, pushing sales up from 200,000 to 250,000, and we wouldn't be able to attract that kind of German money if it were not for the labour-market flexibility now being denounced by Amicus and the T&G.

No one would have the confidence to invest so much in the car industry, and to employ so many people, if they did not have the simultaneous confidence that they could also lay people off when the market became difficult.

So fixated is the European left and much of its right on shielding everyone from chance and guaranteeing timeless security that one marvels they were ever able to break out of feudalism.