Globalisation is Not Moral; It’s a Machine for National Decay! By James Reed

In March 2021, a container ship named Ever Given became infamously stuck in the Suez Canal. For six days, this 200,000-ton behemoth choked off one of the most vital arteries of international trade. On board? French oak, felled in Europe, shipped halfway around the world to China, then slated to return to Britain as veneered flooring. That absurd supply chain is not just inefficient, it is the perfect metaphor for the insanity, and immorality, of globalisation.

We were promised a "rising tide" that would "lift all boats." Instead, globalisation has run aground, much like the Ever Given, trapping the world in a self-inflicted bottleneck of economic dependency, ecological waste, and political paralysis. What we got wasn't perpetual prosperity, but a hollowing out of industry, culture, and national sovereignty, Australia being a notable example.

The champions of globalisation insist it is a moral project. It connects people. It promotes peace. It lowers prices for consumers. But cheap prices come with a hidden price tag: deindustrialisation, unemployment, environmental degradation, and the death of local skills. If morality means anything, it must include justice for one's own people, not just profit margins and GDP figures.

Sending timber halfway across the planet for basic processing isn't a marvel of free trade, it's a parable of moral failure. Why can't they process it in Britain or France, employing local workers and reducing unnecessary emissions? The answer is simple: profit for the few outweighs prosperity for the many. Globalisation doesn't care about community, continuity, or country. It cares about capital.

Defenders of free trade love to invoke Adam Smith and David Ricardo like gospel. But even the patron saints of classical economics understood the dangers of unrestrained markets. Smith believed the invisible hand would naturally guide capital to invest at home, for reasons of stability and security. Ricardo explicitly warned that his theory of comparative advantage assumed capital could not move freely across borders.

Today, capital is hypermobile, and that changes everything. British factories close while Chinese mega-plants boom. Skills evaporate, communities decay, and the supposed benefits of globalisation concentrate in the portfolios of the Davos class. This is not an accident. It's a design flaw in the system, or rather, it's the system working exactly as intended for those who designed it.

In Britain, free trade has been elevated to sacred doctrine. But the historical narrative is all wrong. The Corn Laws weren't repealed by a noble populist uprising; they were crushed by elite factory owners who wanted to underpay their workers. Free trade didn't make Britain great. Protectionism did.

It wasn't until the Crown banned imported wool products and invited Flemish weavers to teach manufacturing skills, that England began its industrial ascent. Free trade, by contrast, kept the country trapped in exporting raw materials, the very fate now suffered by many post-industrial Western economies that traded away their productive capacity in exchange for cheap trinkets and global dependence, again like Australia.

Donald Trump was right: nations have a moral obligation to protect their industries. Tariffs aren't an act of war, they're an act of self-respect. They tell the world that we will not allow our workers to be sacrificed on the altar of global efficiency.

Studies of Trump's tariffs during his first term show that, once you account for the decades-long industrial collapse already underway, his measures did help protect jobs. Imagine what could be achieved with a coherent long-term strategy, one aimed at restoring balance, resilience, and national pride?

Globalisation has made us dependent, on rival powers such as communist China, on fragile supply lines, on cheap labour abroad. We've become addicted to convenience while ignoring the cost. But national strength does not come from dependency. It comes from self-sufficiency. Sovereignty without production is a ghost.

It's time to reject the dogma that trade must always be free. Real morality involves responsibility, to one's own citizens, to the environment, to the future. Globalisation has proven to be a reckless abdication of that responsibility. It has made a few people rich and many people miserable. It is not noble. It is not fair. And it is not moral:

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-immorality-of-globalisation/