MANY of us in the labour movement will have watched recent developments in the steel industry with a grim sense of familiarity.

While the news that 40,000 jobs are at risk is stark and shocking, the truth is that the story of steel is the norm rather than the exception in Britain today.

Successive governments have acted as if they have no responsibility to safeguard industries, services and jobs for the future. Privatisation has not just been the start of the government’s thinking about the future but the end of it. In place of an industrial strategy we have seen asset-stripping on an industrial scale.

Although in recent days the government now claim they will intervene, this apparent U-turn — though welcome — is borne out of weak and desperate leaders who never had a plan and are taking crisis measures in response to public pressure.

There is a convenient lie the government likes to rely on when the limits of its thinking have been exposed. It claims that its role has simply been to get out of the way of the free market and fair competition. As the steel crisis has shown, this is nothing more than a myth.

The government has been perfectly happy to intervene on behalf of Chinese steel producers at an EU level, just as it has lobbied to protect the City of London and offshore banks. And there has been nothing free or fair about the Chinese government subsidising steel-dumping in this country.

The other way the steel crisis has exposed the government’s lack of strategic thinking about our industrial future is the connection with the privatisations of the 1980s.

One reason the government is deferring to China now is because China owns much of Britain’s nuclear industry. It only does so because the privatised Centrica (formerly British Gas) refused to invest in this when it was approached in 2013 — its private shareholders insisted on an excessive return and instead ended up spending £500 million on a share-buyback to boost their own wealth.

We are seeing worrying signs of the same problems with the government’s approach to industries and the economy in areas where CWU members work.

Rarely has it been cheaper than it is today — or, given the state of the economy, more desirable — for the government to invest in the country’s infrastructure. In few areas is there a stronger case for this than in broadband and the digital economy. Yet public spending on broadband in Britain is a fraction of that in France and Germany, both of which have far more ambitious targets.

Not only is the government failing on investment here, but we also now have Tory MPs queuing up to call for the break-up of BT in the name of competition. This risks thousands of jobs and threatens to dismantle the only business capable of delivering broadband on a national scale. For a government calling itself conservative it appears hell-bent on destruction.

In the postal industry, just like in steel, there has been nothing natural or free about competition. Royal Mail has been forced to carry mail at a loss for rival operators in order to guarantee them a market share. And there has been nothing more self-defeating than the privatisation of a profitable Royal Mail, which is now paying hundreds of millions of pounds a year to meet the demands of shareholders rather than investing in its future.

The Post Office is another national institution which is now at risk. The government wants to end public funding for the network completely from 2018 and in order to achieve this has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on slashing costs and removing jobs.

But this isn’t sustainable and will do nothing to secure the future of the Post Office when much of its core work is under threat from technological change. The case of the Post Office shows austerity is less about the government running out of money, than running out of ideas.

What all of these things underline is the urgent need for a new political settlement in this country and a decisive shift in industrial policy. This is something only the left is capable of delivering. As the Tories’ economic strategy unravels their only industrial policy remains an attack on the trade union movement.

And for all the debate about sovereignty in the EU referendum, neither the In or Out factions of the Conservative Party have anything to say about giving workers meaningful control over their future.

As I said at the People’s Assembly march last weekend, while we all went to the demonstration talking about what the government was doing wrong, the test of our success would be leaving London talking about what we were going to do about it.

The CWU’s conference, starting in Bournemouth this weekend, is the moment for our union to do just that.

It is time for all unions to connect their industrial and political strategies and increase the pressure for a new political settlement. We don’t have to wait until 2020.

• Dave Ward is general secretary of the CWU.