How liberal globalism went bankrupt

I used to complain about liberalism at university but in fact I thought liberalism and conservatism were allies, little though I liked what I thought were Margaret Thatcher's nineteenth century liberal policies. 

Now they are mortal foes. Perhaps they always were. 

Liberalism is dying, it seems, but conservatism is being suppressed very hard. There are few conservatives to be seen.

This is the beginning of a very interesting article in the Spectator site, with which I completely agree. Free trade has been used against the West by China.

When future historians chronicle the period after the Cold War, the rise of China will dominate their accounts. Beginning in the 2000s, China unleashed a flood of state-sponsored manufactures, many of them produced by western multinational corporations using Chinese labor on Chinese soil. This impoverished much of the already pressured industrial working class in the US and Europe, triggering populist revolts in rustbelts like the American Midwest, the north of England and eastern Germany.

The recycling of profits from China’s chronic trade surpluses through the global financial system enriched western financial interests and helped to inflate bubbles in the real estate and stock markets. These burst in 2008, causing the Great Recession. Meanwhile, Chinese military assertiveness in the South China Sea and along the Sino-Indian border has produced a regional arms race in Asia. China’s aggressive ‘wolf-warrior diplomacy’ has undercut its Belt and Road Initiative, provoking a backlash from Asia to Europe. At the same time, the reassertion of Leninist tyranny under Xi Jinping has turned China into a high-tech totalitarian state, with a nightmarish social-credit surveillance system, the destruction of limited liberty in Hong Kong and the horrifying repression of China’s Uighur minority.

Steve Bannon and Donald Trump saw this long before most of us. And then came the virus, a symbol of the dark side of globalisation, Sinification. 

I am and have always been a believer in free trade but we cannot drive the train of logic into the buffers (as Ian Macleod said Enoch Powell did).