Louise Gilmour: DIY is the only way to rebuild amid ruins of Trump’s demolition job on world economy

Despite the lunatic insistence of his White House flunkies, Donald Trump is no strategic genius.

The US President was not three steps ahead or following some elaborate masterplan when he torched the global economy before setting his clown shoes on fire trying to stamp out the flames.

It is hard to see an upside when a balloon on a stick would be a more effective leader of the free world but, if you squint, there is a glimmer of silver in the pitch-black lining.

A bewildering White House and rapacious Kremlin have given our leaders something to think about and, amazingly, they seem to be thinking our country needs to make stuff again. Trump machine-gunning the markets has not ended globalisation, of course, but it has badly shaken the accepted wisdom that underpins it.

It seems to have dawned on some of our politicians that, in an uncertain world, relying entirely on other countries to build our things might have risks attached.

Trump rampaging around the White House like a horse loose in a hospital has encouraged ministers to consider whether actually making things here might offer a little more stability.

It’s about time, but this isn’t about isolationism, protectionism or making Scotland great again. It is only a clear-eyed acknowledgement that recent decades of full-tilt globalisation came at a cost. It created huge profits for huge companies but rubbled our industrial base while offshoring skilled work and good, well-paid, unionised jobs.

National Grid announcing the latest phase of its upgrade provided a recent example, if any more were needed, when it awarded £21 billion to six cable suppliers and £25bn to four other companies for converter stations to help Britain harness our renewables.

The 30 or so executives squeezing into the boardroom for pictures were a united nations of corporate bigwiggery after jetting in from Greece, South Korea, Belgium, Italy, Japan, the US and all points in between. None, not one, will cash their big cardboard cheque in the UK.

It is not Trumpian to ask why building crucial national infrastructure, across energy, defence, and transport, could not be done from here instead of there.

For too long, our politicians seemed to think globalisation was inevitable, even progressive, providing cheap stuff for us and jobs in poorer countries, a rising tide lifting all boats or somesuch.

© DC Thomson

Their unquestioning complacency now lies in the debris after Trump’s detonation of economic custom and practice.

Maybe it was coincidence that the UK Government felt compelled to step in to save the country’s last blast furnaces just weeks after allowing the quiet shuttering of Grangemouth.

Maybe it was a happy accident that ministers suddenly realised the Chinese owners of British Steel might be more interested in protecting Beijing’s interests than Britain’s by – oh, I don’t know – turning off the lights in Scunthorpe and selling us their own cheap steel instead?

Maybe, but it is clear the world is now a far more uncertain and perilous place and the unthinking assumptions shaping our governments’ foreign, defence and economic policies for generations are blowing in the wind.

We must hope for the best but plan for the worst and the plan needed right now, before all others, is an industrial strategy capable of helping us retool and restaff our factories and shipyards, construction sites and engineering yards.

We need to build a new sense of national resilience, self-reliance and security, but building stuff comes first.

Louise Gilmour is GMB Scotland secretary