Why is No One is Talking About Deindustrialisation?

Because you kicked 'deniers' off the airwaves!

‘High energy prices cause deindustrialisation.’ Who knew? Well, this groundbreaking discovery appears to be the implication of a short documentary film from Sky News’s Ed Conway. “Our film is up,” he told followers on X, “we spent months making this.” And it’s “about how Britain shut down many of the factories we need to feed us and defend us”. Brilliant. Exactly the sort of thing that we have been arguing TV News should have been talking about for decades. But still the conversation in Conway’s film, The UK is losing the industry that makes everything, is mute and misses the point.

At 18 minutes long, it barely scratches the surface. After visiting a decrepit salt processing works, we hear a short history of Britain’s former chemicals industrial glory fading in the story of chemicals giant ICI being broken up. A visit to yet another site, Wilton, formally operated by ICI, which “used to be one of the, if not the biggest chemicals complex in Europe, if not the world”, bemoans Conway. “Pretty much everything has shut down, we’re visiting one of the last places that hasn’t shut down.” Eight minutes in, and an interview begins with Peter Huntsman, CEO of US firm Huntsman Chemicals, which bought part of the old ICI estate, amid acres and acres of mothballed plant… DuPont… Ineos… Nylon… now mere graveyards. “My biggest cost over the next five years,” says Huntsman at nine minutes 30 seconds into the film, “will not be an increase in oil and gas prices, it will be an increase in climate taxes.”

It has taken more than half the film’s duration to get to this point. Admittedly, by today’s standards, it is a shocking departure from the mores of the ‘metropolitan media elite’ – as culturally challenging as British TV’s first interracial kiss or first gay kiss. Indeed, cultural hegemony is such that interracial queer non-cis pornography is preferable to our elites to such overt climate change denial being shoved down our throats!