The man is not for turning

Tweet I'll admit to never having been a fan of globalisation, whether economic or cultural. Reading Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) in the 1970's was a significant influence on the development of my own political philosophy, and as I recall, Sartre said something along the lines of "merely insisting on being Basque is itself a revolutionary act".

At a cultural level, Welsh nationalism is at least partly about maintaining human cultural identity and diversity, and at an economic level, it combines with environmental concerns in supporting a more localised economy. Localised is not necessarily the same thing as protectionist or isolationist, nor does it exclude the promotion of trade with developing countries in ways that assist them. But when I read that shrimps are caught off the British Isles, landed in Scotland, and then shipped to the Far East to be shelled before being shipped back to Scotland for packing – then I know that globalisation has gone too far.

That's an absurd example, obviously – although there are plenty more like it – but one of the consequences of globalisation has been the creation of long thin supply chains; and I think even supporters of globalisation ought to be more worried about that than they appear to be. The complexity built into the supply of goods and services, coupled with rigorous attempts to ensure 'just in time' delivery and reduce the amount of 'working capital' employed by businesses, makes the whole economic system extremely vulnerable to a failure at a single point.

The failure of financial markets has hinted at that; but there are a range of potential events in the real world which could be even more devastating. As a simplistic example, I'm not convinced that people really understand the potential economic impact of a major flu epidemic in the Far East, even if no-one in the UK even caught a cold.

What sparked this train of thought today was reading about David Miliband's speech in Cardiff last night, where he seems to have said that the financial turmoil won't deter Britain from continuing globalisation. I struggled to find any trace of a logical basis for that statement. It reminded me of the remark attributed to Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?".

It worries me that, in the face of a clear warning about the way in which globalisation has led to an essentially US problem being exported to the rest of the world, the response seems to be to accelerate the process of locking us into an approach which has an increasing potential for systemic failure. The facts have changed – shouldn't policy also change to reflect that?