There are nostalgic reasons for rejecting the Kraft takeover of Cadbury – another iconic British comapny lost overseas – but the real arguments are rather different and much more compelling. First, a nation’s strategic control over its own industrial base can gradually be whittled away to the point where its economic survival and prosperity can be put at risk. Industry is a closely inter-connected network, and when increasingly key industrial decisions are taken overseas on the basis of foreign not domestic interests, the viability of that network can be seriously undermined. The hollowing out of US industry is one example, and (as in so many other ways) the UK shows signs of following. Second, as most other countries have concluded, there are strategic companies of such central significance to the economy that they cannot be let go. By contrast British governments, both Thatcherite and New Labour, in thrall to a deregulatory neoliberal philosophy, have refused to intervene in the loss of such key companies as BAA, PowerGen, National Power, British Steel, Rover Group, Jaguar, ICI, Boots, Cazenove, P&O, and Pilkington. This glorification of the market against the integrity of the nation may well come to be seen as damaging as unfettered financial markets are now seen to be.

There are also the destructive knock-on consequences of allowing markets in the form of enormous agglomerations of capital to make fundamental decisions, without consultation or regard, which hugely disadvantage other stakeholders. Cadbury was lost to Kraft because hedge funds rapidly bought into Cadbury in the hope of a quick windfall profit after which they would immediately sell and then move on, without concern for the wider long-term industrial consequences. If capitalism allows such central pieces in the wider economic jigsaw to be disposed of so easily, it illustrates yet again how primitive, sectional and unbalanced the capitalist system is. Because of Kraft now having taken on a punitive level of debt of £22bn, some 30,000 jobs may now be put at risk. But did that weigh in the balance? Not in the slightest. For both major political parties the market rules uber alles.

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