In answer to your first paragraph, not if we refine it ourself and sell it to ourselves. That's a government decision not to do that. Given the current situation, I'd say we should have been doing this year's ago. Why can't we do this?
It's also a government policy to import grain, when we are perfectly capable of growing our own. Why?
And beef.
And steel. We can't make anything without it. Why does it come from abroad when we can refine it ourselves?
We can be independent, we still have the skills, the will, and the enthusiasm, we just don't have the suitable leadership to achieve it.
Sad times
There is a shortage of labour, both skilled and unskilled, with enormous political reluctance to accept we need immigrants. This is why crops are rotting in the field as we speak, and why, for example, it is increasingly difficult to find a GP.
Capital for the refineries, steel mills, etc. Where is it coming from? The private sector in this country is extraordinarily reluctant to invest, except where there is a short-term profit. This has been a problem for decades. Wishful thinking will not change that. Do you want the state to make the investment? That's left-wing and scary. This government will certainly not go down that road. I very much doubt Labour will. They would get too much grief from the media if they tried.
You must also consider the Law of Comparative Advantage. This is a complex piece of economic doctrine, but in simple terms it is
always advantageous to trade with other countries. Some countries are simply better placed to do certain things more efficiently than we are. So we are better putting our resources into areas where we are clearly ahead of the field and exchanging the value for imports.
(At a personal level, most of us don't do all our own plumbing, electrical work, and dentistry, because it is simpler and better to employ specialists to do these things and pay with them with the money we earn by our skills in other areas. It's no different. If I spend 10 days doing a plumbing job that a plumber can do in 30 minutes that's a gross waste of resources. The Law of Comparative Advantage is this on a national scale.)
You appear to confuse 'independence' with 'autarky'. Autarky is a bad and failed economic system. There are no fully-autarkic nations in the modern world, as even the most isolated have some level of participation in international trade and receive outside support or aid. North Korea and Nazi Germany are two examples of nations that have pursued a policy of autarky.
Far from developing 'independence', which is a chimaera at best, we should be developing interdependence and, this is key, focusing on developing those areas of the economy that are most profitable and in which we are demonstrably very good. What really holds us back is the aforesaid lack of investment. This in part is caused by the national obsession with pumping almost all private resources into housing, not industry.
