Thanks to The Register, here is a nice graph of the decline of manufacturing in the UK since 1945. You'll notice one small problem with the "decline" bit.
British industry has always tended towards high-value high-tech manufacturing -- ships, motorcycles, cars, aircraft etc. These were especially important for export markets to garner foreign currency. New forms of tech have come into play over the years but there are fewer jobs and less manufacturing of that sort any more -- there is no indigenous British civil aircraft industry left, only a segment of Airbus Industries. No Hawker-Siddeley, no Shorts, no Avro. The British car industry is today almost all subsidiary operations of foreign-controlled businesses assembling designs and models planned abroad -- I except the smaller garden-shed operations like TVR and Morgan from this wide-brush description but even Rolls Royce Motors belongs to someone else (BMW I think?)
There is no magic in British manufacturing, nothing intrinsic in the British way of doing things that cannot be copied and replicated abroad where the wages are lower and the workers benefits less. Steel mills in Malaysia are just as computerised as the most modern plant in Britain, the schools in the Far East are producing engineers and technicians just as skilled as any graduates from British colleges and universities. In addition we've used up most of our indigenous raw materials; to make iron and steel here we have to ship iron ore from thousands of miles away. We're even running out of accessible native coal that can be used to make decent coke for blast furnaces. Shipping costs have come way down over the years but it's a lot cheaper to make steel close to the iron ore mines and ship the finished product than to ship the raw ore long distances, and so the British blast furnaces are being turned off one by one, and we don't make steel any more. We used to employ hundreds of thousands of people to do that; after nationalisation and modernisation in the 70s we employed tens of thousands to produce just as much steel. Today we employ thousands to make less steel and tomorrow hundreds or fewer.
British industry has always tended towards high-value high-tech manufacturing -- ships, motorcycles, cars, aircraft etc.
All the industry where I was brought up concerned the entire process of taking raw cotton and turning it into clothes, not particularly high value, though it was high tech in its time. Yorkshire did the same with wool. That industry died out in the 1980s rather suddenly.
Bombardier still use the Shorts plant to make parts, and we do dominate the "building Formula One cars" sector ;-)
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drplokta
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Date: 2010-02-22 06:04 pm (UTC)There is no magic in British manufacturing, nothing intrinsic in the British way of doing things that cannot be copied and replicated abroad where the wages are lower and the workers benefits less. Steel mills in Malaysia are just as computerised as the most modern plant in Britain, the schools in the Far East are producing engineers and technicians just as skilled as any graduates from British colleges and universities. In addition we've used up most of our indigenous raw materials; to make iron and steel here we have to ship iron ore from thousands of miles away. We're even running out of accessible native coal that can be used to make decent coke for blast furnaces. Shipping costs have come way down over the years but it's a lot cheaper to make steel close to the iron ore mines and ship the finished product than to ship the raw ore long distances, and so the British blast furnaces are being turned off one by one, and we don't make steel any more. We used to employ hundreds of thousands of people to do that; after nationalisation and modernisation in the 70s we employed tens of thousands to produce just as much steel. Today we employ thousands to make less steel and tomorrow hundreds or fewer.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-22 06:12 pm (UTC)All the industry where I was brought up concerned the entire process of taking raw cotton and turning it into clothes, not particularly high value, though it was high tech in its time. Yorkshire did the same with wool. That industry died out in the 1980s rather suddenly.
Bombardier still use the Shorts plant to make parts, and we do dominate the "building Formula One cars" sector ;-)