You don’t always have to make a profit, Frank, if you are talking about something on which the country relies in which case you have to take into account the cost of the alternative. So, if the country relies on potatoes, and they’re being produced at a loss, then you have to calculate how much it would cost to import them and add to that the costs of giving welfare payments and retraining the newly unemployed former potato producers when you shut down the potato fields. And you can never go back; once the potato-fields have factories and houses built on them they’re gone. And that’s the point at which your foreign potato supplier increases the cost of his potatoes in the safe knowledge that you can no longer grow them yourself.

A similar thing is happening in Whitehaven where they want to open a new coal-mine. The environmentalists are up in arms, nationally and internationally. How dare we open a new mine to dig up fossil fuels? But the coal is of the sort needed to produce this country’s higher quality steels and, without supplying it ourselves, it would have to be imported. Of course then even more fuel of some sort would have to be used (probably diesel) to get it here, but that means nothing to your average environmentalist. Coal = bad to them. It’s the same with your economic argument, Frank, where loss= bad even when it’s sometimes a viable option.

It’s not always black and white, heaven and hell or profit and loss, Frank, and it’s only your blinkered, narcissistic approach to life that’s stopping you seeing that.