For want of a bonnet cable, the West was lost

If you can strangle the supply of key components, you can suffocate a country in manifold ways. No bonnet cables? No cars. No medicines? No healthcare. No semiconductors? No nothin'.

Wanting to check the oil, I tried to open my bonnet. Crruunk went the cable, snapping somewhere in the depths of my unhappy Vauxhall.

It was due a service anyway so I booked it in. On the phone, the chap at the garage said that the bonnet cable was a manufacturer-only part. The problem was that they stopped producing it years ago. He suggested I go online and find a replacement for him to fit.

Not long ago there were 600,000 Vauxhall Vectras on the road, so it is hardly a rare car. Since then numbers have fallen markedly. This is perhaps in part to the car's alarmingly dull design, which borders on the soporific. This may have been what attracted my car's previous owner, who kindly left a pair of leather driving gloves under the steering column. They remain there as a token to him.

Despite its previous ubiquity, I defy you to find a bonnet cable for the blasted thing (part no. 9177229 if you happen to have one lying around). They are impossible to get your hands on. The bonnet will have to remain closed, at least until I decide to go full Mad Max and remove it with a hand-held circular saw.

I'm not the only one struggling to find parts. After a previous collapse of demand, car makers are struggling to ramp up production amid a global shortage of semiconductors. Waiting times have almost tripled since the golden age of pre-Covid. Not only that, lots of the raw materials – lithium, plastics, steel – are also on short supply.

This has led to the used car market exploding. Scrap cars are also rising in price: amid a global lack of replacement parts, stripping cars destined for the scrapheap has become a profitable business. Who knows, maybe that's where I can find my bonnet cable. It wouldn't take many months of such shortages until we will have to start keeping our bangers on the road, Havana-style.

All this got me thinking. If you can strangle the supply of key components, you can suffocate a country in manifold ways. No bonnet cables? No cars. No medicines? No healthcare. No semiconductors? No nothin'.

The fact that our largest import market is the People's Republic of China may be relevant here. Vital components across a range of industries are increasingly sourced from our largest geopolitical rival. It is the kind of absurd situation that only a country governed by the pygmied minds of Oxford PPE graduates could have got into.

(On a side note, if you need an effective emetic, look up some videos of Call-Me-Dave or Gideon praising their Chinese overlords, trying to wax lyrical about the 'Golden Age of Sino-British Relations', their voices heavily muffled by the wads of renminbi stuffed into their gobs.)

Pursuing the perversity of untrammelled shareholder interest above national geostrategic concerns, we have not only offshored vital industries, but have allowed the Chi-coms to establish a foothold across industries and institutions in the UK.

Huawei, having been banned from installing the nation's 5G network, will provide a private 5G network to companies in Cambridge Science Park instead. Anyone silly enough to use such a network may as well send their data directly to Beijing with a 'thank you' note attached.

There are nascent signs that the government recognises this threat. Twenty years too late is better than never, I suppose. The takeover of a small Welsh graphene company by a shady Chinese enterprise has been called into question, as has the Chi-com's attempted take over of Newport Wafer Fab, Britain's largest semiconductor producer.

However, when the Chinese finally take over Taiwan, they will gain control of sixty-three per cent of the world's semiconductor industry. At that point they'll probably forget about Newport Wafer Fab.

But we won't be able to afford such luxuries: with our primary strategic rival in almost full control of one of the twenty-first century's most vital technological components, there won't be much left to say or do.

Suddenly, a few bonnet cables will seem like the least of our problems.