It was the Queen I felt for most last week. As head of the Church of England we can only guess at the maelstrom of emotions in her head as she welcomed the president of China to her table at Buckingham Palace. Being one of the world’s most influential Christian leaders, Good Queen Elizabeth will not be unaware that Xi Jinping has been an enthusiastic participant in one of his country’s most popular civic pastimes: giving the Christians a right good kicking and keeping them down. Of course, diplomatic protocol forbids the Queen even having a word in the ear of Xi about the intimidation of Christians and the routine torture and murder of Chinese citizens if they speak out of turn.

The Queen, poor soul, has been through this distressing charade oftentimes before. The close relatives of President Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania must have gained solace from the knowledge he went to his death by firing squad comforted by the still-fresh images of his red-carpet treatment by the Queen several years before. But that’s the Queen for you, friend of the friendless, comforter of murderous dictators everywhere.

And you have to feel sorry for David Cameron too. There he was, having cleared four days in his calendar to bow and scrape to this dismal sociopath in the hope that the vile Chinese government would choose the UK to be its principal trading partner in Europe. The things you have to do these days to save British jobs. Mind you, they do have to be the right sorts of jobs.

Obviously, the thousands of UK jobs that went up in smoke last week as a direct result of China dumping cheap, inferior and state-assisted steel into the marketplace was unfortunate and, goodness gracious me, the timing could have been better. But what are a few thousand steel jobs and an entire heavy industry in truculent Scotland when there’s the chance to do business with the world’s richest dictatorship?

Placed alongside the obvious discomfort and embarrassment to the Queen and her prime minister, the steelworkers who lost their jobs and their families don’t really have much to worry about at all. If they’d been reading the right sort of newspapers they would have discovered that the globalisation that put paid to their jobs has actually made them richer and happier, job or no job. Don’t they know that millions fewer people all over the world are living in “absolute poverty” and that median incomes have grown by more than 75%, according to the World Bank?

Surely they must know that, under Conservative doctrine, the rule of the marketplace and of competition must be paramount in every facet of British life, even when you’re trading with a country that murders its citizens, strangles free speech, artificially distorts the marketplace and breaks the rules of competition?

Such is the anthem of the hard right that now holds sway in this country and that was sung all week by its acolytes: move along, nothing to see here. It’s just another heavy industry being dismantled and a working-class community whingeing for state intervention and, ha-ha, nationalisation.

The change to Westminster’s standing orders that will exclude Scottish MPs from voting on English-only matters was just the cherry on top for the Tory hard right. It was their way of saying: “We’re the masters now.” North of the border, perhaps we should consider reserving our taxes for Scotland-only services.

Who cares if 250,000 children in Scotland are living in poverty, after all? They’re not living in “absolute poverty”. And just be thankful that you’re even getting £6.50 an hour because millions of others born in the wrong country don’t even have roofs over their heads. We are told that globalisation sets its own rules and that there is nothing you or I can do about it and that the state cannot intervene artificially to save economically stricken communities. It all depends, though, on whether you belong to the right kind of community.

Will preserving what remains of the steel industry in Scotland and a plant in Scunthorpe cost the taxpayer as much as it did (and continues to do) in 2008 when the state partially nationalised the banks and pumped in £500bn of our money to prop them up? Criminal behaviour, corruption and lies had brought some of these banks to their knees yet they were rewarded with a bail-out that cost each family in the UK more than £2,000. The conditions attached, such as lending more to small businesses, ending the culture of grotesque bonuses and smaller home deposits, have all been cheerfully ignored.

Perhaps if the steelworkers had been farmers they might have expected some government intervention. In 2001, the government spent almost £1bn compensating farmers following the foot and mouth disease and made 37 of them overnight millionaires amid claims from within the National Farmers’ Union itself that the compensation system had been rigged. Nor were some in the farming community brought to book for many of the questionable and risky feeding practices that partly contributed to foot and mouth.

The steelworkers, though, are a different breed: they are expendable and, just like the miners and the shipbuilders, when their time comes, the rest of us are told that they didn’t upskill enough and were hostile to change management. They were working in a dying industry. Yet the last time I looked the world was still using lots of coal, many people were still using ships to sail the seas and steel is still used in the construction of bridges and buildings. And if demand ever wanes then we can get the Americans, supported by us, of course, to start a wee war somewhere.

The artificially depressed steel prices will not remain so and will climb again, so nationalising the industry for a few years, as we did with the banks and effectively did with the farmers, makes sense. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government must expedite the temporary nationalisation of the two steel plants in Motherwell and Cambuslang. The price for doing this must be set against the cost, for the next three generations, of unemployment and the physical and mental wellbeing of a community.

If millionaire bankers and affluent gentlemen farmers are worth saving, then so are our steelworkers.