I was disappointed when the Thatcher era let some of our industry go the wall because some of it could've been saved in the right hands and there was still potential imho but Andy Burnham saying the government should've bailed out Thomas Cook I find myself thinking what a waste of money this would've been. Unfortunately Thomas Cook have fallen victim to the times and the government pumping loads of money into the firm would've only delayed the inevitable.
Plus, Thomas Cook wasn't exactly a strategic asset. Like BAE, nuclear power, telecoms.....
Other EU countries seemed to be very good at ensuring as many capital intensive domestic contracts as possible went to domestic manufacturers. If not on best bid, on other criteria, like social impact. We rarely seemed to fight as hard to keep manufacturing in our own country.
Apologies to any non-Brits. However, when we insist on conducting warfare, or business, or other hard or soft power, like its a game of cricket, with everyone playing by the same rules, we will get rogered time and time again.
I honestly believe that Theresa May thought she could smother the EU Brexit negotiators in middle class niceness and win them over with sugar and spice and all things nice. They stated publicly that they were going to punish us for daring to vote to leave and they've done exactly that. No subterfuge in this instance. Plain English. We will punish you.
And what did we do in response. We started negotiations by explicitly or implicitly promising to fold on every issue that mattered.
We let the Irish government create hysteria and raise tensions over the border issue, which allowed the so-called New IRA to try to kill more Catholic police officers and put teenagers back on the streets in Londonderry, rioting against their own police service.
The Irish government have Lyra McKee's blood on their hands and I will never, ever forgive them for that. They played their domestic politics with Northern Irish issues and it ultimately resulted in the murder of a brilliant young journalist and one of the few sources of my own hope for the future here.
We are lions led by donkeys. Not in the trenches of the Great War, but now, on the green benches in the Mother of Parliaments.
I apologise for straying off topic, but I do not apologise for the sentiments I have expressed here.