There are thus no sources of independent economic and political power. The party sustains its monopoly of power by control of the economy it owns what it considers strategically important and allows private companies to operate only because they submit to a board of communist officials. This is a system of Leninist corporatism. Of course the party should let go, but it does not operate the kind of market economy that Bambi thought he was admiring. The party has wrestled for a generation with the reality that these companies, designed by Mao to embody the communist dream of uniting economic and social obligations, abolishing worker exploitation and spearheading modernisation, are sclerotic economic duds. Chinese state-owned companies are a byword, not least in China, for inefficiency, loss-making and politicisation of decision-making. Fukushima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are remembered around the world. This is a breathtaking step in an industry where the sensitivities over operating safety, technical efficiency and waste disposal are so acute. Thirty years later, we learn it's become a gift to the Chinese Communist party, offering its state-owned nuclear power companies price and profit-margin guarantees that privatisation and liberalisation, wholly unrealistically in such a long-term business, were supposed to have left behind for ever. Lady Thatcher boasted, when the electricity industry was privatised, that she was giving power back to the people.

The most eye-catching deal was on nuclear power, with the agreement that the Chinese nuclear industry will be able to build and own nuclear power stations in Britain. I wonder, as he prostrated himself before the Chinese, whether he asked himself why he вЂ“ and Britain вЂ“ had ended up kowtowing to such a degree. Britain has surrendered its capabilities in sector after sector in the name of liberalisation and privatisation, a strategic policy that Bambi is continuing with unquestioning enthusiasm. They also showed how indefensible so much financial and industrial policy has been over the past 30 years.

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