Lots of you have pointed out the contrast between the government's keenness to support British Steel and its reluctance to help universities despite the fact that the latter have been cutting even more jobs than British Steel. So, why does the government seem to value manufacturing more highly than services?

The rescuing of British Steel has been defended on grounds of "security" - although as Daniela Lai says, this alone does not tackle the problems of global overcapacity in the sector or the need to green the industry*.

But the steel industry isn't unique in winning government favour. Starmer is also cutting "red tape" to help the car and pharmaceutical industries whilst not cutting it to help universities, for example by increasing the numbers of student visas. That's a clear bias, despite the fact that universities do what the government claims to want - create and support well-paid jobs across the country.

Of course, nobody (except
perhaps Patrick Minford) believes governments should deliberately wreck manufacturing. But they should recognize that services industries sometimes need support as much as manufacturing. So why doesn't the government see this?

The question isn't of course confined only to the UK: some of those who defended one iteration of Trump's many tariff policies did so on the grounds that protectionism would lead to the return to the US of manufacturing jobs.

For me, two things deepen the puzzle. One lies in
Wuthering Heights. Everyone in it seems to catch a chill and die. Which seems implausible - until you look at the buildings around Haworth where Emily Bronte was writing. They are still caked in soot. And if manufacturing did that to stone, it would have wrecked people's lungs - hence so many early deaths from what today are mild infections. Today, however, many of those satanic mills have been converted to flats or (in the case of the gigantic Salt's Mill**) to popular art galleries, shops and cafes. What once shortened lives now enhances them. Post-industrialism is fantastic progress.

The other thing that deepens the puzzle is that there's nothing new about the loss of manufacturing jobs. In the UK we've been losing them since the early 60s. Many of the problems this caused are now decades old: Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA adressed themes of loss of community and masculine identity 40 years ago. If successive governments haven't much fretted about manufacturing since the 80s, why start now?

A lot of the answers just aren't good enough. Let's consider them.

"We need to produce goods to pay our way in the world."

But we don't need to make things. Just as individuals sell services to pay for goods, so too can countries: France, Spain and Portugal - to name but three - all have net exports of services to pay for net imports of goods. In principle, the UK could too. That we do not do so is because we consume too much: a current account deficit, by definition, is equal to the excess of domestic investment over savings.

"Manufacturing jobs are better paid."

True. On average, weekly earnings are 11% higher in manufacturing than in services. But manufacturing is not a magic sauce that raises pay. Insofar as wages are higher there, it is because the jobs are more skilled or give workers more bargaining power. If you want to raise wages, the answer is not to create more manufacturing jobs - and certainly not in low-skilled assembly work - but to ensure a tight labour market; encourage strong trades unions; or increase skills. The latter, of course, requires (among other things) a thriving university sector, something the government is doing little to encourage.

"Manufacturing provides more satisfying jobs."

It's true that making and repairing things is both personally satisfying and worthy of admiration in others - hence the popularity of TV shows such as The Great British Sewing Bee, Repair Shop or The Great Pottery Throwdown. And it's also true that the service sector contains a lot of bullshit jobs. But you don't need to be Harry Braverman (pdf) to know that mass manufacturing and individual craftsmanship are entirely different things - a point made by the Sewing Bee's Patrick Grant in his book, Less. The reality of manufacturing work was better captured by Arthur Seaton in
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; back-breaking monotony in which the bastards grind you down. There's a reason why Marx's theory of alienation originated in the manufacturing era.

If we want better, more fulfilling jobs, the answer isn't to restore manufacturing but to reassert the values of professionalism or craftsmanship against the corrosive effects of capitalist managerialism. Which, of course, is so far off the agenda it might as well be a passenger on Voyager 1.

Instead, I suspect there are two other reasons why Labour is so much keener to protect some industries than others.

One is simply the power of lobbying. This is why Reeves is keen to cut banking regulation, despite obvious evidence that insufficiently lightly regulated banks can do enormous damage to the whole economy. Perhaps if university VCs did what bosses should do and spent more time managing upwards, universities would be in better shape.

Except that there's another reason for the government neglecting them. It's the same reason that will keep the pubs open a little longer on VE Day. The government's vision of the UK is an atavistic, backward-looking one, be it of Britain standing alone against Nazism or of us being the workshop of the world. Of course, we no longer live in such a world. Our comparative advantage now lies less in manufacturing than in higher education and creative industries: we have (or have had) far more world-class universities than manufacturing businesses. It is what Hardt and Negri have called immaterial labour that dominates the economy, not overalls-clad industrial workers.

But as the Economist's Bagehot says, politicians are more concerned with dead voters than with living ones:

Manufacturing, a small part of the economy, plays a big role in politics everywhere. Britain is no exception. A speech at a jlr plant has become a rite of passage for any leading politician in recent years. Dead Man's old job comes first for Britain's politicos. The lives of workers in Britain's services economy come second. True, manufacturing's weak performance after the financial crisis is one reason for Britain's woeful productivity growth. Yet politicians cling on to a primitive vision of it.

This is why the government's love of manufacturing doesn't go so far as wanting to remove trade barriers with the EU by rejoining the single market***. It's about pandering to a dead voter's image of a (partly mythic) past, not about actual real material conditions.

Alongside this primitive vision of the economy is a primitive one of the working class. For the political elite, this consists of uneducated bigots who, if not dead, are retired. The reality is that the working class comprises anyone struggling to pay the rent - very often, young, educated socially liberal people working in services.

But these don't count politically. Whereas Blair and Thatcher used to speak of modernity, politicians today rarely do so. Their mindset is one of dragging us back to the past. And the fetishization of an outmoded vision of manufacturing is part of this.

* It's also curious that "security" concerns didn't stop Thatcher from destroying the steel industry in the 80s during the cold war, perhaps because a world in which we cannot import steel could also be one in which we can't import iron ore either.

** I strongly recommend you visit it - and don't miss the fantastic early music shop there.

*** Nor will it cut energy prices for industry despite them being high by international standards, given its kowtowing to rent-seeking monopolists.