Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.
It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend
People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.
The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From that moment on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation. I thought it was because my city (Coventry) was devastated after world-war-2, the collapse of the British car industry and then the closing of the coal mines leading to low tax money for roads and things.
However I just returned last night from a trip to London (I live in Sweden now) and I have to say, the decline is precipitous and pronounced, London gets all the investment so if it's decaying this way then I shudder to think about the rest of the nation.
I think a lot of people outside the UK believe that because the UK had an empire that everybody was rich. This is decidedly not the case, the first people the British elite subjugated was the British themselves, that's why most of the food we're mocked about is so bland: it's poverty food, so when I say that it feels like a decline, please keep it within the context that most of us have our entire family tree in the underclass - not because we were once rich.
Most infrastructure has not been invested in during my lifetime, and it was old when I was a child.
Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK.
That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the peak of the British Empire, which itself I place at just before the outbreak of WW1 owing to how Pyrrhic that victory was.
I think it's in part generational (a bunch of western countries have a quasi dead-locked democracy because boomers will vote whatever suits them short term, they will be dead when the bill comes anyway) and part due to the lack of accountability that democracy has brought to the upper echelon of society, or lack of skin in the game for the ruling class.
Revolving doors, blatant corruption, and downright incompetence lead to absolutely no repercussions; what's there to lose? Schröder is the poster child of this.
We are creating generations of people with no stake in society (no housing, no family because it's costs too much and no time anyway) while at the same time having a complete lack of ethos as a civilization, with a terrible ruling class. Europe (and the UK) are in a horrible position.
The upper class has none to little stake in society either, or so they seem to believe. I bet in practice, if the shit really hits the fan, it won't be so fun for them either. Other countries may also have problems at the same time.
" People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years "
This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia. First, I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years. 50 years ago, China was an extremely impoverished country that no one would take seriously as a competitor for global influence, Iran was US-friendly and the USSR was on the peak of its power.
It's not really nostalgia, when 95% of infrastructure was constructed in the 70's and not maintained (something you see a lot in the UK outside of the south-east) you can feel this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus
The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic interest needs you to do things outside the commercial domain or under duress, or with restrictions of access to supply in those other places.
There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
I might add that Australia is in pretty much the same boat (hah) and the shemozzle over the Tasmanian Ferries (ordered from Scandi, parked in Edinburgh because too big for their home port dockside tie-ups) is an exemplar. And there's a high speed double-hull "cat" style fabricator in Tassie, or at least there was.
In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise. I sailed around Falmouth 30 years ago with a friend and indeed, a lot of big ships were laid up in the estuary and river mouth. Awesome sight in a small sailing boat.
"Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million"
The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget.
How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"?
> In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise
By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.
For a country that is an Island you'd think that the question of whether or not it is 'national-strategic' would have been answered in the affirmative.
If shipbuilding is a strategic national industry, doesn't that also make all the inputs to a shipyard strategic industries?
After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.
They is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, unless you believe we buy steel from the same places we buy ships.
The real answer to this is threat analysis: what are the realistic scenarios under which it becomes a problem. e.g. if Japan stops supplying ships a) how likely is that and b) could we just buy them from the Dutch instead? However, the stakes for getting this wrong are high.
If it’s sourced from abroad it has to be shipped (blockades anyone ?)
If your usual trading partner is inaccessible for reason X , what are the odds your alternate trading partner is also affected by reason X? Are there geopolitical or national political reasons that partner B might become unavailable or unpalatable at the same time?
I mean, if we are talking about a big war scenario, then simply the distance to Japan would mean Dutch ships are clearly the better choice.
Otherwise sure, realistic threat scenarios. But the world is also changing fast. Denmark or Canada did not expected to be militarily threatened by the US some years ago and still this is where we are now.
It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day.
The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.
Like people were not feeling the pain in the first half of the XXth century when we decided to own our nuclear stack? It's a matter of political courage.
Disagreements about what is of national interest is always going to be a thing.
In my opinion, having a country that doesn't have the means to build, at the very least, what is needed to keep its economy going is not in a good spot at all.
aka zero skin in the game, and, worse, a lot to earn by doing favors and pushing for quick profits for their friends in the corporate and finance worlds
Those people are thinking just fine. With their wallets.
Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time).
They also know they'll be fine and have their salaries, extras, and nice corporate post-politic sinecures whetever their performance. Just see Blair.
> Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
How about because they are human people like you and me. You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
How about if they really screw people over they know there will be mass protests
>How about because they are human people like you and me
Oh, sweet summer child.
>You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
Because I wasn't promoted and passed all the exams of a system designed to promote sociopaths, party interests, and corporate/financial/M.I.C. interests, nor did I have the sociopathic self-selection to want to get to the highest offices of power.
Sorry, but it's a bit funny. Based on the name I assume you're French (speaking, at least)?
That "XXIer" contraption is really funny to me, I speak a bit of French. In English it's twenty first so XXI or XXIst, in French as far I know it's vingt et unième, so XXI or XXIème.
Is "XXIer" from another French dialect or another language entirely?
>Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.
That's because it exists on the benevolence and because of the benefits of it existing to several third parties. If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.
Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.
It's not practical for most countries to have a viable industry in every so-called critical good across an economy. As another commenter noted, it's even less practical the more complex it gets because you need to be self-sufficient in the entire stack, not just parts of it.
What good is fuel refining without oil? What good is shipbuilding without mines and smelters? Without the ability to build massive shipboard diesels? Etc.
Moreover, it tends to make your real friends a bit nervous when you want to make yourself independent of them, because than you have less reason to defend them. It's not to say you should make your food production dependant on them, but when your sole reaosnt to figure out how to build ship engines is so you don't need to buy them from Germany (totally random, probably wrong example) it feels a bit off.
This is all ignoring the tremendous costs inherent in this sort of autarkic ideal. People enjoy the highest standards of living ever today thanks to global trade.
South Korea is a long way away, if supply chains are contested and there are competing bidders for their outputs. South Korea is far closer to Singapore.
"Friends" is a strange concept in national strategic planning. You might ask yourself "just how much are those friends going to come and help when push comes to shove" and look at current politics, and re-assess what has been commonly felt these last 50 years: no prior friend can be assumed to be motivated to still be a friend.
Think about Taiwan. All these friends, and now the biggest one says "we think you're too risky. move all that advanced chip making to us, onshore, we'll talk more about how seriously we want to be a friend and defend you after"
There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week.
Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.
My main point is that close allies (both geographically and in terms of relationship) are about as good as having your own local industry. In a few important cases and areas, having production with friends is better than at home.
Mostly because it's harder for local political interests to capture a foreign economy.
>The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Sometimes the time to fix a thing in general (nevermind the "best time") has come and gone, and the rest is wishful thinking and platitudes like "the next best time is now".
Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic area.
As the article mentions, the U.K. shipbuilding industry was dependent on cheap, skilled labour.
It doesn’t touch upon just how cheap.
My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.
The other thing that the article elides is just how much that workforce was shattered by the wars - an awful lot of Glaswegian and other shipbuilders signed up for the navy, as it was a much better opportunity than just making the boats - and proceeded to die at sea in droves. Their families did not receive compensation or their pay more often than not, as it was considered to be bad for morale to say a ship had been lost, and instead all aboard would be classed as missing or as deserters, and when they did finally say “yes, this ship was lost” 15 years after each war, it was usually far too late to be of any use.
Anyway. I just can’t see the working classes or international human rights organisations being willing to do the same again.
I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
A lot of people seem to yearn for the "good old days" where we built giant, tangible things that did cool stuff. That's fine, but the "national security" arguments ring hollow as you're basically saying all institutions, intelligence agencies, defense agencies, etc. are asleep at the wheel if it truly is a threat... which I guess is possible but highly unlikely.
> I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
The flaw in that annoyingly common logic is 1) countries are very reluctant to use nuclear weapons, and 2) any kind of nuclear escalation is an instant loss for your own side.
I personally don't think any country would resort to nuclear weapons in the case of an invasion or blockade, and certainly not a democratic one [1]. They may threaten, but I don't think they'd actually put that gun to their own head and pull the trigger.
[1] An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
> An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you"
I don't think that could realistically work. The suicidal leader would need buy-in not only from the military command, but also from the numerous operators responsible for preparing and conducting the launches. Everyone involved would be presented wiath a choice between signing death sentenses for themselves and their loved ones or trying their luck with whatever enemy they were facing.
That's also my thinking that nullifies a lot of the discussion here. Like why would anyone start a naval beef with the UK, given the UK's nuclear submarine fleet?
It's not about starting a direct conflict, it's that blockading it can be done at a distance rather easily.
If ships can't get to the UK, or the foreign shipyards reduced to rubble - or outbid - then it's more effective and cost efficient then any direct kinetic action.
That’s the point, and you’re in big trouble if that’s what you’re actually dependent upon is something you can’t use. Nukes are only for the other nukes. The bit of butter, so they say, Betty bought to make the bitter butter better.
Russia aren’t going to use nukes on their own doorstep. That’s a a NATO problem. It’s like openly knifing somebody in public repeatedly while holding the would be hero’s at bay with a gun. Yes this is an actual thing that happened in the UK about 10 years ago.
Having nuclear weapons does not give you immunity to all threats. Quite recently we had a case of nuclear state being partially occupied by a state without nuclear weapons.
And even in that case use of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable escalation and they used regular army to (mostly) kick them out and carry on with their earlier invasion on other parts of the front.
(I am speaking about Kursk if anyone is confused)
Use of nuclear weapons when you are mildly threatened is not viable. In the same way as responding to a pickpockets with an artillery barrage is not viable.
"We do not need police as we have an artillery" is equivalent of "there is no need for any other weapons if you have nukes".
To be fair, the credibility of the Russian nuclear stack is questionable at this point. Its unclear how much capacity survived the past 30 years of graft. We have developed nations struggling to maintain theirs without layers of blatant corruption weaved into the process.
Even if so, I don't think anyone doubts that they do have functional nuclear weapons. Maybe not all 5000 of them, but definitely enough to use them if they want to.
I think the whole narrative of "well maybe Russian nukes don't actually work" is unhelpful - if they wanted to use nuclear weapons they would and the weapons used would work. I think people sometimes think Russia is North Korea experimenting with sticks to make fire(and even they have managed to get something working) - despite the massive corruption their nuclear industry and the engineering corps are functional and it's in my mind without a doubt that there is a stockpile of weapons which would work if needed.
Russia is just not suicidal enough to actually use them in the current conflict, luckily.
You seem to think nuclear weapons stop all forms of tension short of nuclear war but the evidence is strong that even nuclear armed parties do things which don't include nuclear weapons. India applies strategic pressures to it's neighbours including ones with nuclear weapons. They're bashing each other with sticks and stones on the border, to avoid pulling nuclear triggers.
There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down.
British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent.
You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.
For anyone else wondering, "ad-blue" is another term for DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), which is a chemical used to decrease emissions from diesel engines.
>>There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
Just a reminder that Ukraine is currently at war with nuclear equipped Russia and it could absolutely use more ships, more tanks, more aircraft, more bombs, more guns, more drones and everything else that forms traditional warfare. It's clearly not like countries will immediately go from zero to nuclear weapons in any conflict.
Australias Unofficial naval strategy is "bomb the shit out of scary boats with Growlers".
Australias Official naval strategy is "We need more boats for reasons (cough asylum seekers cough), definitely not because it is politically expedient to keep boat builders employed"
Well I doubt they'd be using Growlers, but even if they needed to they cost too much ( $80 million a piece ) to be thrown into modern naval air defences, and don't have the range to be deployed where they could actually reach ships causing trouble.
>Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.
Britain does not have a gigantic army of reserve labour to deploy that's doing nothing. It's a relatively small country compared to its competitors (as is Australia), it has limited capital. To recuperate the costs of a large industry in particular you need to be internationally competitive to export at scale. Is that even achievable and worth it at the cost of any other place you could put that capital?
It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff, autarky does not necessarily diminish your dependence because you're necessarily getting less. North Korea is very autark and still dependent because it's also poor.
The problem is that the analysis of the alternatives only ever takes into account efficiency and not resilience. Which is typical of “rational expectations” belief systems based upon atomised individuals.
However the real world has politics in it, as we saw during the pandemic, at which points jurisdictions commandeer resources for themselves regardless of whether a “better price” is available elsewhere.
Within a jurisdiction where resources can be directed you only need one capacity for output. In a market situation you need multiple suppliers all of which with excess capacity to supply that you have reserved and which cannot be countermanded by other action (so it needs to be defended with military capacity). Once you cost all that in you may just find that doing it yourself is more efficient, once resilience is taken into account properly.
Nature rarely goes for the most efficient solution. When it does it tends to go the way of the Dodo.
Makes a lot of sense in textbooks. But in the real world, when politics is involved, the whole theory breaks down. What does your text book say about China holding rare earths hostage in regard of comparative advantage?
It's worrying to me that the idea of comparative advantage has become such common parlance among non-economists that it's being used to justify everything without any real analysis or justification. It's not a solution for everything and it's not always applicable or relevant. Free trade is good, sure, but that's not the discussion here. It's not about free trade vs no free trade. Nobody posed that question here, so why are you bringing it up as if it's relevant?
>It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is.
A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow.
The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities.
Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.
Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies, as a national priority. If this means building cars, ships, tanks, and planes, then that infrastructure should be built and maintained at taxpayers expense.
Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dice on a handful. Every now and then you have to prune back the organizations that are not working, and give a shot to startups to see if they can do better.
If you can't tell, I believe in big, transparent, government.
> Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies
This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.
The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.
Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.
This seems completely unrealistic nowadays, unless you are the size of China or the United States. The EU could also do this, but there seems to be currently only limited appetite for a more integrated EU.
This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.
In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.
Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.."
Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.
I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.
We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.
Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.
But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.
But they don't do everything, and frankly drones are very overstated: they're not magic, and the idea of fielding masses of things when your adversary is at least China backed is pretty farcical: we can't ever win a conflict on cheap mass production because we don't have it.
So a handful of hard hitting long range weapons is going to be a key part of the strategy: because if we can't hit the factories, we can't win period.
I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out).
When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and avoids mentioning what other countries did better.
This is unfair.
Italy manufacturs the Costa Crociere cruise ships and many other things.
Everyone loved to laugh when Costa Concordia sink. It made them confirm their bias that Italian are funny and bad at technical things. While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
There are few ships ever built that don't sink when you ram them properly into rocks. I don't think that I have read a single article that faulted the shipbuilder for the disaster.
Can't wait for the battle of the Thames river between the British North Sea fleet (purchased from China) against the imperial Russian fleet (also purchased from China)
On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
When you source out part of your production to a friendly nation, it's a cooperation. If you source it out to a non-friendly nation, this dependence is a liability.
General economic defeatism in this, and similar discussions, is staggering. Historically, many countries were suffering from various forms of economic malaise and managed to pull trough. Countries that lacked almost any form of industry have become powerhouses.
South Korea is a good example. The previous century hasn't been kind to Korea in general. By the 50s, the southern part of peninsula was generally less industrialized than the north, and recovering from horribly destructive war. Threat of another invasion from the north never went away.
And yet, successive governments have turned things around, and turned South Korea into advanced, functional, industrialized country. It has problems with aging population, but who hasn't?
West Germany in the second half of 20th century is another example. Devastated by war, occupied, mistrusted by neighbors, reliant on imported labor. And yet it put itself together. Lately it hasn't been doing so well, but for decades it was a model of prosperity.
Stories like this are abundant. Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of political courage. Politicians must be willing to withstand short term pain, and plan for the future. They must focus on long term prosperity, not on immediate popularity boosts.
Everyone here, I believe, agrees that the way things have been going is unsustainable and incredibly damaging to the very people it's meant to benefit. It can be fixed, it will take time, but it can be. Because it happened before.
You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come and gone. It is in many ways a failing state with no prospects for recovery. Across virtually every metric it looks bleak. And vague comments about withstanding short term pain and planning for the future ignores that they already tried that, and it didn’t work.
I think let's not forget that at the start of the period they mention, the UK (and British Empire) as a share of world GDP was larger than the US is today. It was clearly never going to be able to sustain that position.
Let's also not forget that the country effectively bankrupted itself during WWII. Investment from the Marshall Plan was basically used to prop up the currency which ultimately failed. There were 'balance of payments' crises well through into the 1970s when Bretton Woods collapsed.
"As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive."
> Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.
When you don't have a minimum wage, or your minimum wage is vastly lower than other competitors, it's far more efficient to hire more people than to invest in process improvements.
The cost of labour is DRASTICALLY overstated (except when it comes to executive pay then its apparently good value for money?), and the push/obsession with supernormal profits is DRASTICALLY understated.
I feel this explains our "productivity puzzle" quite well - A lack of infrastructure and R&D investment that is holding the UK back and really needs to be fixed.
I've struggled to understand exactly why our productivity is so bad here and I feel that this really explains it quite well - over reliance in tried and tested methods coupled with a lack of capital investment - for example relying on push-carts in the yards rather than looking at whatever was a more automated approach. It's not necessarily a case of a "productivity puzzle" but rather a puzzle as to why business owners aren't investing.
I got talking to a guy in the pub who told me about a local tire business, running completely on paper and manpower. In 2025 there's barely a hint of computers in the business. Seems like a similar story really. They could be making more sales, be more efficient, still employ people but redeploy to more useful roles. But no, a prevailing attitude of just carry on with pen and paper, and the MD can buy himself a flash new motor every year. When asked why the don't use technology it was like a fear of it, that they would be made redundant. I don't even mean AI, I mean even like a simple messaging system to IM from one side of the warehouse to another.
It goes into a lot of detail on exactly how the process modernization happened in Brompton, with the sorts of challenges that you and the replies are talking about. The process and the workers need to adapt, in ways that the workers appreciate and fit the actual process of manufacture. Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
Ha, see what the unions have to say when you threaten the livelihoods of the poor downtrodden push card operatives, there will be placards and flaming braziers by the front gates before you can blink.
If the MD is able to buy himself a flash motor every year, perhaps he doesn't have any incentive to improve the efficiency. Sounds like he's doing alright.
If you perceive your work to be artisanship (and a lot of people in the automotive and custom bicycle business do, along with people in the high end furniture business, for example), and you have enough customers who agree, and enough work to keep yourself and your employees busy and your families all fed, then a messaging system that speeds up productivity really is a lot of bollocks, basically (particularly for a company which is, in my experience of these amazing people, still disproportionately likely to hire people with dyslexia or reading difficulties). Because you cannot do more work of the same quality faster.
One thing tech people misunderstand is that these "artisanship" oriented companies can scale at least into the dozens of employees, almost all of whom want to do methodical uninterrupted skilled work or quiet, consistent labour, and who would rather hire four or five very understanding, very capable tech people to handle all that stuff for them. This is not a failing, it's a culture. Some great businesses in the UK run on the "don't add unnecessary tech bollocks" model, and IMO they should be encouraged to continue if they can, because that, it seems to me, is one route to surviving in an AI-bullshit-led industry.
The fact that the tech industry seems to thrill at systemically fucking this up and selling systems users do not need based on marketing fear that they are falling behind is quite depressing to me, not to mention a failure of systems analysis. Just because you are a tech person it doesn't mean you should be selling a messaging system to people who actually could just get the benefit from one more person to handle co-ordinating with the front office.
Tech people are, IMO, quite irresponsible in this way. We have all been trained to answer "we have a problem with X" questions with "we can build you a Y for that", when responsible consultancy would first rule out non-technical process flow improvements.
This is not Luddism. It is obvious that in skilled-work industries you should get things like "office-wide-instant-messengers" out of the way of people doing the skilled work so they can do it uninterrupted at an appropriate pace. There is no non-desk-bound job that is meaningfully improved by notifications buzzing.
I love how the capitalist laws of markets that instigated the rise of China as a the main ship builder - cheaper labor, automated production, low cost of all the source materials also coming from China - don't seem to apply for the people making the argument of protectional national strategic industries.
This is no different than any other industry. Unless you are on the cutting edge of a product where innovation is still being pushed, then your industry is going to be eaten up by China.
The UK at its peak was producing 1.4M in ship tonnage, now it produces zero. The US currently produces 69k in ship tonnage. China produces 37M in ship tonnage. Even if you can scale back to the historic peak, it's nowhere near enough. The difference between zero produced ships a year and 3 per year or 30 per year may as well be zero when China is producing 3 per day. It's over.
All the industries in the UK are on the decline and most UK companies are being either sold off, shut down or are being owned (for a long time) by foreign companies.
It may take several decades for the UK to come back from this.
The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre.
I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples.
With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
The triple lock is a politically motivated policy which always grows the state pension (given to essentially all UK citizens and anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years) at a rate faster than earnings grow or faster than the economy grows. It will subsume the entire government budget.
Given the extremely high cost of energy, and housing in many places, younger people also seem to be opting out entirely. Disability payments the government pays are increasing at a rapid rate. (1 in 13 of the population are currently receiving this benefit).
> With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
What are you referring to here? Higher rates of income tax are only taken on the money earned over the band. So If you earn £50,271, you pay 20% on £50,270 and 40% on £1.
As well as the childcare benefit removal others have mentioned, you also begin losing your "tax free allowance".
The marginal tax rate for 100k -> 125k is 60% (due to losing the ~£12k tax free allowance)
"Your personal allowance goes down by £1 for every £2 that your adjusted net income is above £100,000. This means your allowance is zero if your income is £125,140 or above."
>anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years
To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension.
Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.
This is called mean reversion in history. The UK and Japan are small island countries. They lack the resources and manpower to sustain long-term industrial prosperity. Everything they have is temporary. In the end these industries flow to large nations with vast resources and large pools of technical talent. It used to be the United States. Now it is China absorbing Japan and Korea. This applies not only to shipbuilding but also to automobiles and all precision industries.
Seems a naive simplistic philosophy. The UK is larger than South Korea and has a similar population size. Yet South Korea has outcompeted the UK and US in ship building. By most accounts by investing in advanced technology and ship building technologies.
Having population and talented populous is a requirement but not sufficient for achieving big things. It requires leadership as well. Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
> Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
it wont last long. even china dont use military to take taiwan, china will still win on this in the the end. It's just a matter of time. A lead of a few decades doesn't mean everything from the perspective of historical dimensions, it's still too short.
also, china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.
So your solution to “Taiwan is outcompeting on silicon” is that the PLA Navy should take it by violent force and overthrow a peaceful nation and justify that calling that normal?
Japan has always been an industrious, populous and quite productive country even back then (before the colonial era). It tops rankings on historical GDP. I agree to a certain degree about the UK, but even in this era of Japanese depression, they are still the world 3-4th most productive country.
yes but for now.if you analyze Japan's industrial data in detail, you'll find that they are in an unstoppable downward trend. Basically, all the industries they excel in, just like those in South Korea and Taiwan, are being replaced by China. Shipbuilding has become a game dominated by China(>50%) and Korea; home appliances, automotive industry, steel, chips, computers, and so on. Of course, right now, like in the automotive sector, Japan still holds an advantage in terms of volume, but everyone knows that electric vehicles are the future, and the core technology for the battery industry is almost entirely in China's hands. Even Tesla initially used Japanese technology, but they were ultimately surpassed by China. Relying on native protectionist strategies from the US and Canada, Japanese cars still have many advantages. But in open markets, Chinese electric vehicles are making inroads everywhere. Vietnam is gradually banning fuel-powered motorcycles, which is one of Japan's main products, but policy changes will allow Chinese electric vehicle brands and VinFast to capture more market share. We cannot predict exactly how long it will take for Japan's industry to completely exit the historical stage, but what we see is indeed a dying man. (Of course, Germany is already dead.)
so i wouldn't say 'always', even it can be reach to 100 years(unlikely). its a great achievement, but its not 'always'.
(Moreover, when predicting industrial trends, we must note that the future trend is robots. In this regard, due to China's vast population, the per capita number of robots hasn't yet reached the top spot, falling below Singapore and South Korea. But in terms of robot technology, I believe even the United States can't compare. Of course, in large models, the United States is still leading by a wide margin. So, determining how long China can rule industry in history, first of all, it will definitely be much longer than Britain and Japan, and another core reason is the decisive role of robots. If robots lead to the end of industrial transfer, then as long as China doesn't collapse for other reasons, China will forever have industrial advantages.)
a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!"
but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence.
how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? on virtually every objective metric, it is off by an order of magnitude. frankly it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
>without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
London would be considerably poorer, there is an argument that the rest of the country may well be better off. The finance sector is our equivalent to the oil industry in Dutch Disease.
How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Specialization is the answer. The bigger you are, the more fields you can be competitive in. But even regions much smaller than the UK can be world leaders in something, if they choose to prioritize that and play their cards right.
There is nothing preventing the UK from taking advantage of the talent pool, supply chain, and consumer market of an equally large economy in their chosen field. Except maybe the UK itself.
National borders are as important as you choose to make them. Small countries have always relied on diplomacy and trade to be successful. The UK just needs to accept that it's one small country among many, and start acting accordingly.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
I don't think so. It certainly did not hurt but there is another major factor: The UK is the house where the industrial revolution was born. And they still have the scars from it. And I think that is in part why they lost it: they were ahead but with fairly primitive stuff and then others overtook them because they didn't have that heritage to maintain and keep up. Just have a look at the London subway for an excellent example of why being early out of the gate with stuff like that isn't always the best in the long run.
Some more examples: Some countries in Africa are now ahead in mobile usage for all kinds of official stuff including payments, insurance and government interaction. Countries that were late to adapt to mobile infrastructure ended up with 4G or better where as the rest is having trouble phasing out their 3G networks because they've become invisibly dependent on them.
I've read a book called Four Hundred Years In America before; I don't know if its English version is popular. It points out that one core reason for the South's defeat in the Civil War was how vital the cotton trade between the American South and Britain was to both sides. So the North used their fleet to blockade the South's cotton exports to Britain right away, leaving the South without the trade revenue to import steel and other materials needed for building railroads—basically sealing their fate. Britain just pivoted to sourcing cotton from places like India, still not relying on local production. This example really drives home how Britain's industrial foundation was way too dependent on raw material inflows from the colonies.
I haven't read the book you referenced but there are many articles which say essentially the same thing. In addition, there are some historians who claim the British created the conflict in an attempt to partition the US into north and south, a trick they used almost everywhere they went. Matt Ehret for one.
India is the most prominent example, to tiny Cyprus.
Are you OK? You seem to have issues with when to capitalise letters. Understandable when English is a second language and you have a lot more forums to piss on.
"how could the UK ever compete with China" - What is the point? China isn't really that important. It's handy for cheap stuff but nothing else.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
That is simply not true. UK and Japan are big enough to compete in specific sectors. The problem is the entire world gifted China their manufacturing ability and then gave up. Climate policy, short term economic thinking and unions all worked together to destroy the west manufacturing capability.
Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.
The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.
In a way it is story that repeats itself on a larger scale as a whole with the western world.
One of the things that annoys me is that the west lost the opportunity to continue to be world's manufacturing powerhouse in the 90s and early 00s. We should have invested in automation and efficiency to the point where developing countries even if using slave labor and no environmental regulations to still not be able to compete on price of end product. It is not as if there was not substantial technological advantage at the time.
If there was going to be a rust belt - well it is better if jobs were outright destroyed/obsoleted than moved to other countries.
It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments:
> I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
I grew up in the UK and it felt like everyone of my parent's generation had stories like that. My father was in management and had to go toe-to-toe with a union that was on the verge of wiping out his industry (private sector TV), they were doing things like shutting down transmissions as part of demanding higher wages. In that specific case the unions failed as the TV companies were able to automate the transmission suites and then fired all the workers, this was in the 1980s I think when the legal environment was more conducive to that. Funny story: one of the fired workers moved to the US and ended up writing a popular series of thriller books that ended up being turned into a movie series, he became very rich in the process. So the union failing ended up being good for that guy in the end.
But in many industries they weren't able to beat the unions thanks to a series of very weak left wing governments in the 50s, 60s and 70s (even the Conservatives were weak on labour until Thatcher) that largely made opposing the unions illegal. So the industries just got wiped out one by one. Today the same problem exists but with Net Zero instead of unions, it makes electricity so expensive that industry becomes uncompetitive vs parts of the world where they don't care, and the political class is fine with this outcome. Decades and decades of governments that cheered on deindustrialization for left wing ideological reasons.
So whilst the shipping industry probably did have problems in management (just like the car/steel industry), ultimately having good management wouldn't have helped. What determined if an industry survived this period or not was whether the management was able to automate fast and completely enough to break union power.
The main reason the car industry couldn't hack it is because of quality issues. There was this joke sticker for the back of your Jaguar or Rolls: "The parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture".
I worked a lot on classic Mini's, Metros and Maxi's. The degree to which body work had been patched and bent to match it to the corresponding chassis was quite amazing. Rumor had it the Leyland factory had a guy with a very large hammer standing at the end of the line to 'adjust' the doors if they didn't close properly. I totally believe it. I've seen almost new subframes that were Swiss cheese from rust and/or with very bad welding.
That said, there are few cars that are more fun to drive than a souped up Classic Mini, and even fewer that would be as lethal in an accident.
Which, it should be noted, is not a common goal among unions.
I’m a union metalworker in the US shipbuilding industry— our products are expensive, but in very high demand domestically and internationally. That’s true for various reasons, but in no small part because our quality is exceptional, and people regularly get fired for compromising it. Some unions do seem to strive to protect incompetence at all costs, but none of the ones I worked for in any industry ever defended it. I have a feeling the cases where they do are heavily influenced by shakedowns and corruption rather than being genuinely that tribal. Some police unions probably fall on both sides of that spectrum.
Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.
Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.
And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.
Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.
A union is functionally a business which sells labor. It's usually structured so that sales are indirect, with their customers paying the workers directly, but that's just accounting.
There's no fundamental reason that a union should seek to prevent anyone from ever getting fired, anymore than any other business would see to prevent any of their employees from being fired. Likewise, there's no fundamental reason that unions should be bad for the businesses that hire their members. A prosperous client is good for business.
Some unions are badly run and hurt themselves. Americans especially tend to assume all unions are this way, partly because of some high-profile examples, partly because of a culture of individualism and association of unions with communism, and partly because of propaganda. But they definitely do not have to be like that.
Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.
There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.
The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.
That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.
It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).
The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.
> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country
There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture.
> the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to
That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history. :)
> I don’t know it unions were the whole story
Looking at the two countries with the best reputations for quality, a lack of union and labor projection may be the problem: Germany has very strong unions; in many cases, they get a seat on the board of directors. Japan treats its labor very well - often lifetime jobs, famously Toyota empowers assembly line workers to stop the entire line themselves - and has low labor market liquidity (but my info on Japan could be out of date).
Erm, British management is also famously terrible.
Coal has horrible externalities and its demise is a good thing.
British iron ore is not very rich, and it never was; Britain has imported iron ore since the 19th century. Given how cheap it is to ship iron by sea, it's very hard to justify using low-grade ore that has to be moved by rail.
Because of the large size of the manufacturers, a medium-size country will only have a couple of them, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement like what happened at British Leyland, AMC, Chrysler, Nissan, ...
"The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong".
That's the conventional wisdom, but is it true?
It was the Thatcher government that shut down those industries. Maybe they didn't need to. There was a lot of collateral damage, privately owned suppliers that went bankrupt etc. A lot of countries have state subsidised industries, including the USA. GM was bailed out by the Obama government. Boeing and Tesla and SpaceX get tons of government money..
There is an interesting book by Tim Lankester, who was the chief economist in the Thatcher government. He has mixed feelings.
If you are interested, the book is:
Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Experiment by Tim Lankester
Blame the workers, it’s absolute bullshit (apologies for language).
My view is privatization opened up the British market to globalization, and fundamentally once everyone is trying to get things for the cheapest price the domestic supply chain shrinks, in the UK it has shrunk to the point it vanished. Other countries with stronger protection for domestic production (like the US with the Jones act and dredging acts, Norway) avoided exposure to the global market and survived.
> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result.
And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful to certain monied interests.
> By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift.
Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy.
The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.
Yes, but in the end you still live in physical reality, and this determines our actual productivity.
Whether we can make a boat, or a tennis racket, or a toothbrush cheaply is in the end what determines how many people can have boats, tennis rackets and toothbrushes, not whether the service economy, or our scientific research is excellent. We can hope to be able to do neat stuff and trade that for products, but in the end, once trade is no longer mandatory when people do not need to obtain foreign currency to obtain oil, everything having become battery-electric, I suspect that everybody will be better off simply building what they want.
This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.
There's lots of rare earth deposits all over the world, but the question is, are you willing to accept the pollution that results from extracting them as efficiently as possible?
China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
It’s easy for a small group to seize the benefits when productivity is centralized in the hands of a small group. If you diversify the ability to build boats, then you may not be rich, but you’ll have a boat.
The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy. If China could turn on a switch and become independent, they'd do it. They can't and it's interesting that the US/EU are not happy with this superior status quo and would rather return to a pre-1900 world where they are the sole center of the world.
It's not going to work, in my opinion; and it's going to end with them having neither. You being downvoted shows that this is not the opinion of the elite only but everyone is onboard the insanity train.
Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.
You mean a friend with a lobbying budget and a revolving door?
It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend
People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.
The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From that moment on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation. I thought it was because my city (Coventry) was devastated after world-war-2, the collapse of the British car industry and then the closing of the coal mines leading to low tax money for roads and things.
However I just returned last night from a trip to London (I live in Sweden now) and I have to say, the decline is precipitous and pronounced, London gets all the investment so if it's decaying this way then I shudder to think about the rest of the nation.
I think a lot of people outside the UK believe that because the UK had an empire that everybody was rich. This is decidedly not the case, the first people the British elite subjugated was the British themselves, that's why most of the food we're mocked about is so bland: it's poverty food, so when I say that it feels like a decline, please keep it within the context that most of us have our entire family tree in the underclass - not because we were once rich.
Most infrastructure has not been invested in during my lifetime, and it was old when I was a child.
Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK.
That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the peak of the British Empire, which itself I place at just before the outbreak of WW1 owing to how Pyrrhic that victory was.
Tbf if the government isn't united, the people aren't united either. And having lived here for almost 8 years now I can see that that's the case.
I think it's in part generational (a bunch of western countries have a quasi dead-locked democracy because boomers will vote whatever suits them short term, they will be dead when the bill comes anyway) and part due to the lack of accountability that democracy has brought to the upper echelon of society, or lack of skin in the game for the ruling class.
Revolving doors, blatant corruption, and downright incompetence lead to absolutely no repercussions; what's there to lose? Schröder is the poster child of this.
We are creating generations of people with no stake in society (no housing, no family because it's costs too much and no time anyway) while at the same time having a complete lack of ethos as a civilization, with a terrible ruling class. Europe (and the UK) are in a horrible position.
The upper class has none to little stake in society either, or so they seem to believe. I bet in practice, if the shit really hits the fan, it won't be so fun for them either. Other countries may also have problems at the same time.
3-5 years is "long term vision" now.
People plan quarter to quarter.
" People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years "
This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia. First, I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years. 50 years ago, China was an extremely impoverished country that no one would take seriously as a competitor for global influence, Iran was US-friendly and the USSR was on the peak of its power.
It's not really nostalgia, when 95% of infrastructure was constructed in the 70's and not maintained (something you see a lot in the UK outside of the south-east) you can feel this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus
The (much longer) article says something different than you do, though there is certain overlap.
The issues were longer-term and revolved around a failure to update working methods as the rest of the world developed.
The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic interest needs you to do things outside the commercial domain or under duress, or with restrictions of access to supply in those other places.
There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
I might add that Australia is in pretty much the same boat (hah) and the shemozzle over the Tasmanian Ferries (ordered from Scandi, parked in Edinburgh because too big for their home port dockside tie-ups) is an exemplar. And there's a high speed double-hull "cat" style fabricator in Tassie, or at least there was.
In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise. I sailed around Falmouth 30 years ago with a friend and indeed, a lot of big ships were laid up in the estuary and river mouth. Awesome sight in a small sailing boat.
If you're going to talk about Edinburgh (I could almost see the Tasman ferry from my house), may I introduce you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco
"Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million"
The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget.
How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"?
> In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise
By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.
For a country that is an Island you'd think that the question of whether or not it is 'national-strategic' would have been answered in the affirmative.
If shipbuilding is a strategic national industry, doesn't that also make all the inputs to a shipyard strategic industries?
After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.
They is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, unless you believe we buy steel from the same places we buy ships.
The real answer to this is threat analysis: what are the realistic scenarios under which it becomes a problem. e.g. if Japan stops supplying ships a) how likely is that and b) could we just buy them from the Dutch instead? However, the stakes for getting this wrong are high.
If it’s sourced from abroad it has to be shipped (blockades anyone ?)
If your usual trading partner is inaccessible for reason X , what are the odds your alternate trading partner is also affected by reason X? Are there geopolitical or national political reasons that partner B might become unavailable or unpalatable at the same time?
I mean, if we are talking about a big war scenario, then simply the distance to Japan would mean Dutch ships are clearly the better choice.
Otherwise sure, realistic threat scenarios. But the world is also changing fast. Denmark or Canada did not expected to be militarily threatened by the US some years ago and still this is where we are now.
It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day.
The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.
Like people were not feeling the pain in the first half of the XXth century when we decided to own our nuclear stack? It's a matter of political courage.
If the people who have the most to lose don't think that something is in the national interest, then is it really?
Disagreements about what is of national interest is always going to be a thing.
In my opinion, having a country that doesn't have the means to build, at the very least, what is needed to keep its economy going is not in a good spot at all.
They're also the people with the most ability to jump ship should something happen.
aka zero skin in the game, and, worse, a lot to earn by doing favors and pushing for quick profits for their friends in the corporate and finance worlds
"think" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Are the people really thinking? I don't think they are.
Those people are thinking just fine. With their wallets.
Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time).
They also know they'll be fine and have their salaries, extras, and nice corporate post-politic sinecures whetever their performance. Just see Blair.
> Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so?
How about because they are human people like you and me. You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
How about if they really screw people over they know there will be mass protests
etc.
>How about because they are human people like you and me
Oh, sweet summer child.
>You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?
Because I wasn't promoted and passed all the exams of a system designed to promote sociopaths, party interests, and corporate/financial/M.I.C. interests, nor did I have the sociopathic self-selection to want to get to the highest offices of power.
australia has almost no fuel refining capacity
most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore.
in the XXIer century some australia cities have run out of gasoline for half a day, an afternoon, a few days
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-...
> XXIer century
Sorry, but it's a bit funny. Based on the name I assume you're French (speaking, at least)?
That "XXIer" contraption is really funny to me, I speak a bit of French. In English it's twenty first so XXI or XXIst, in French as far I know it's vingt et unième, so XXI or XXIème.
Is "XXIer" from another French dialect or another language entirely?
As a french person, it looks weird to me. I would only use it for the very first century: Ier siècle.
Why? Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.
As long as your friends build ships, you are fine.
The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.
>Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry.
That's because it exists on the benevolence and because of the benefits of it existing to several third parties. If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.
Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.
This can go round and round forever.
It's not practical for most countries to have a viable industry in every so-called critical good across an economy. As another commenter noted, it's even less practical the more complex it gets because you need to be self-sufficient in the entire stack, not just parts of it.
What good is fuel refining without oil? What good is shipbuilding without mines and smelters? Without the ability to build massive shipboard diesels? Etc.
Moreover, it tends to make your real friends a bit nervous when you want to make yourself independent of them, because than you have less reason to defend them. It's not to say you should make your food production dependant on them, but when your sole reaosnt to figure out how to build ship engines is so you don't need to buy them from Germany (totally random, probably wrong example) it feels a bit off.
This is all ignoring the tremendous costs inherent in this sort of autarkic ideal. People enjoy the highest standards of living ever today thanks to global trade.
South Korea is a long way away, if supply chains are contested and there are competing bidders for their outputs. South Korea is far closer to Singapore.
"Friends" is a strange concept in national strategic planning. You might ask yourself "just how much are those friends going to come and help when push comes to shove" and look at current politics, and re-assess what has been commonly felt these last 50 years: no prior friend can be assumed to be motivated to still be a friend.
Think about Taiwan. All these friends, and now the biggest one says "we think you're too risky. move all that advanced chip making to us, onshore, we'll talk more about how seriously we want to be a friend and defend you after"
There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week.
Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends.
My main point is that close allies (both geographically and in terms of relationship) are about as good as having your own local industry. In a few important cases and areas, having production with friends is better than at home.
Mostly because it's harder for local political interests to capture a foreign economy.
For an Island that has been dependent importing most goods for hundreds of years...
I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.
Interesting question. Its plausible that there are not many vessels that are UK flagged anymore.
The more interesting question is how many of these are under "control"/influence of domestic operators
If required, a flag can be exchanged in a pinch and tax codes /regulations can be adapted to allow/encourage this.
Happened during the Falklands War.
There are peacetime rules and war time rules, war time rules are best summarised as “government does what it wants and justifies it after the fact”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:... under “Ships taken from trade”.
I just clicked through to some of the listed ships and it appears they were all flying a British flag in 1982 before being requisitioned.
It’s not at all clear to me a government would have that power about a foreign flagged vessel, even if the shipping line owning it might be British.
>The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now.
Sometimes the time to fix a thing in general (nevermind the "best time") has come and gone, and the rest is wishful thinking and platitudes like "the next best time is now".
yeah, you're right, better to sit on your hands and just sit it out idly
The UK is actually doing something(ish) about it now.
Innovate UK (the UK’s public innovation funding) recently had a bid out for maritime R&D but with a focus on clean tech:
https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/opportunities/clean-mari...
Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic area.
I just don’t know that it’s feasible.
As the article mentions, the U.K. shipbuilding industry was dependent on cheap, skilled labour.
It doesn’t touch upon just how cheap.
My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.
The other thing that the article elides is just how much that workforce was shattered by the wars - an awful lot of Glaswegian and other shipbuilders signed up for the navy, as it was a much better opportunity than just making the boats - and proceeded to die at sea in droves. Their families did not receive compensation or their pay more often than not, as it was considered to be bad for morale to say a ship had been lost, and instead all aboard would be classed as missing or as deserters, and when they did finally say “yes, this ship was lost” 15 years after each war, it was usually far too late to be of any use.
Anyway. I just can’t see the working classes or international human rights organisations being willing to do the same again.
I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
A lot of people seem to yearn for the "good old days" where we built giant, tangible things that did cool stuff. That's fine, but the "national security" arguments ring hollow as you're basically saying all institutions, intelligence agencies, defense agencies, etc. are asleep at the wheel if it truly is a threat... which I guess is possible but highly unlikely.
> I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
The flaw in that annoyingly common logic is 1) countries are very reluctant to use nuclear weapons, and 2) any kind of nuclear escalation is an instant loss for your own side.
I personally don't think any country would resort to nuclear weapons in the case of an invasion or blockade, and certainly not a democratic one [1]. They may threaten, but I don't think they'd actually put that gun to their own head and pull the trigger.
[1] An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
> An autocratic one may use them when the leader is close to defeat as one last "f*ck you"
I don't think that could realistically work. The suicidal leader would need buy-in not only from the military command, but also from the numerous operators responsible for preparing and conducting the launches. Everyone involved would be presented wiath a choice between signing death sentenses for themselves and their loved ones or trying their luck with whatever enemy they were facing.
> because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
I am not convinced the current breed of politicians in (more or less) democratic countries sees that differently.
We may add to that - the UK’s nuclear deterrent is onboard submarines.
It's a lot of reliance placed on one rather complex system. See "Trident Missile Test Fails for Second Time in a Row" (Feb 2024)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68355395
That's also my thinking that nullifies a lot of the discussion here. Like why would anyone start a naval beef with the UK, given the UK's nuclear submarine fleet?
It's not about starting a direct conflict, it's that blockading it can be done at a distance rather easily.
If ships can't get to the UK, or the foreign shipyards reduced to rubble - or outbid - then it's more effective and cost efficient then any direct kinetic action.
Submarine fleets will torpedo your blockade. No need to fire nukes.
My understanding is that the UK currently has 5 attack submarines. Is that enough to break a blockade?
More are planned (the SSN-AUKUS), but it is probably still some time away.
Nukes are useless as anything other than a self destruct mechanism. A gunman pointing at your head with himself in the line of fire.
Nuclear submarines as in nuclear propulsion submarines. And nukes are useful because you never need to fire them.
That’s the point, and you’re in big trouble if that’s what you’re actually dependent upon is something you can’t use. Nukes are only for the other nukes. The bit of butter, so they say, Betty bought to make the bitter butter better.
Tell that to Ukraine!
Edit: it's not about throwing nukes at each other... It's about having nukes that you can use if someone invades you.
Russia aren’t going to use nukes on their own doorstep. That’s a a NATO problem. It’s like openly knifing somebody in public repeatedly while holding the would be hero’s at bay with a gun. Yes this is an actual thing that happened in the UK about 10 years ago.
Having nuclear weapons does not give you immunity to all threats. Quite recently we had a case of nuclear state being partially occupied by a state without nuclear weapons.
And even in that case use of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable escalation and they used regular army to (mostly) kick them out and carry on with their earlier invasion on other parts of the front.
(I am speaking about Kursk if anyone is confused)
Use of nuclear weapons when you are mildly threatened is not viable. In the same way as responding to a pickpockets with an artillery barrage is not viable.
"We do not need police as we have an artillery" is equivalent of "there is no need for any other weapons if you have nukes".
People like to imagine a big obvious threat that you respond to in kind, but what about a gradual creeping encroachment aka salami tactics?
Classic scene from "Yes, Prime Minister": https://youtu.be/yg-UqIIvang
To be fair, the credibility of the Russian nuclear stack is questionable at this point. Its unclear how much capacity survived the past 30 years of graft. We have developed nations struggling to maintain theirs without layers of blatant corruption weaved into the process.
Even if so, I don't think anyone doubts that they do have functional nuclear weapons. Maybe not all 5000 of them, but definitely enough to use them if they want to.
I think the whole narrative of "well maybe Russian nukes don't actually work" is unhelpful - if they wanted to use nuclear weapons they would and the weapons used would work. I think people sometimes think Russia is North Korea experimenting with sticks to make fire(and even they have managed to get something working) - despite the massive corruption their nuclear industry and the engineering corps are functional and it's in my mind without a doubt that there is a stockpile of weapons which would work if needed.
Russia is just not suicidal enough to actually use them in the current conflict, luckily.
You seem to think nuclear weapons stop all forms of tension short of nuclear war but the evidence is strong that even nuclear armed parties do things which don't include nuclear weapons. India applies strategic pressures to it's neighbours including ones with nuclear weapons. They're bashing each other with sticks and stones on the border, to avoid pulling nuclear triggers.
There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down.
British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent.
You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.
For anyone else wondering, "ad-blue" is another term for DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), which is a chemical used to decrease emissions from diesel engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust_fluid
>>There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country.
Just a reminder that Ukraine is currently at war with nuclear equipped Russia and it could absolutely use more ships, more tanks, more aircraft, more bombs, more guns, more drones and everything else that forms traditional warfare. It's clearly not like countries will immediately go from zero to nuclear weapons in any conflict.
Australias Unofficial naval strategy is "bomb the shit out of scary boats with Growlers".
Australias Official naval strategy is "We need more boats for reasons (cough asylum seekers cough), definitely not because it is politically expedient to keep boat builders employed"
Well I doubt they'd be using Growlers, but even if they needed to they cost too much ( $80 million a piece ) to be thrown into modern naval air defences, and don't have the range to be deployed where they could actually reach ships causing trouble.
>Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency.
The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs.
Britain does not have a gigantic army of reserve labour to deploy that's doing nothing. It's a relatively small country compared to its competitors (as is Australia), it has limited capital. To recuperate the costs of a large industry in particular you need to be internationally competitive to export at scale. Is that even achievable and worth it at the cost of any other place you could put that capital?
It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff, autarky does not necessarily diminish your dependence because you're necessarily getting less. North Korea is very autark and still dependent because it's also poor.
The problem is that the analysis of the alternatives only ever takes into account efficiency and not resilience. Which is typical of “rational expectations” belief systems based upon atomised individuals.
However the real world has politics in it, as we saw during the pandemic, at which points jurisdictions commandeer resources for themselves regardless of whether a “better price” is available elsewhere.
Within a jurisdiction where resources can be directed you only need one capacity for output. In a market situation you need multiple suppliers all of which with excess capacity to supply that you have reserved and which cannot be countermanded by other action (so it needs to be defended with military capacity). Once you cost all that in you may just find that doing it yourself is more efficient, once resilience is taken into account properly.
Nature rarely goes for the most efficient solution. When it does it tends to go the way of the Dodo.
>comparative advantage
Makes a lot of sense in textbooks. But in the real world, when politics is involved, the whole theory breaks down. What does your text book say about China holding rare earths hostage in regard of comparative advantage?
It's worrying to me that the idea of comparative advantage has become such common parlance among non-economists that it's being used to justify everything without any real analysis or justification. It's not a solution for everything and it's not always applicable or relevant. Free trade is good, sure, but that's not the discussion here. It's not about free trade vs no free trade. Nobody posed that question here, so why are you bringing it up as if it's relevant?
>It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is.
A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow.
The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities.
Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.
Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies, as a national priority. If this means building cars, ships, tanks, and planes, then that infrastructure should be built and maintained at taxpayers expense.
Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dice on a handful. Every now and then you have to prune back the organizations that are not working, and give a shot to startups to see if they can do better.
If you can't tell, I believe in big, transparent, government.
> Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies
This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.
The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.
Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.
This seems completely unrealistic nowadays, unless you are the size of China or the United States. The EU could also do this, but there seems to be currently only limited appetite for a more integrated EU.
I'm sure the Baltic States with a population between 1-2M each, would find that problematic :)
"without reliance on allies"
This is unrealistic for smaller countries, like Ancient Greek poleis or contemporary Estonia. Under your logic, they would have to give up their existence and join some empire.
In practice, already the Greco-Persian wars are an indication that alliances of smaller nations are viable, and that they are more efficient due to specialization. This is not a new problem, nor is it specific for post-industrial history; the Athens were better at fighting at sea, other poleis could provide hoplites.
Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?
Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?
> Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?
A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.
Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.."
Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently.
I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes.
We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us.
Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries.
But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
>Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.
During Talisman Sabre 25, a RCAF C-17 air-dropped a Himars and some ADF personnel on Christmas Island, simulated a firing and then left.
Pushes the defensive line quite a bit further out from the mainland, and you could potentially cover choke points for a naval invasion from the north.
Yeah, so much drama around the gigantic submarines, we should be building water drones of some kind.
We literally are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Shark_(submarine)
But they don't do everything, and frankly drones are very overstated: they're not magic, and the idea of fielding masses of things when your adversary is at least China backed is pretty farcical: we can't ever win a conflict on cheap mass production because we don't have it.
So a handful of hard hitting long range weapons is going to be a key part of the strategy: because if we can't hit the factories, we can't win period.
Ehh, I think the reason we have less wars in Europe the last decades is because we're all connected now.
Italy is barely mentioned in the whole article. Today Italy is the biggest shipbuilding manufacturer in Europe: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...
I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out). When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and avoids mentioning what other countries did better. This is unfair.
Italy manufacturs the Costa Crociere cruise ships and many other things. Everyone loved to laugh when Costa Concordia sink. It made them confirm their bias that Italian are funny and bad at technical things. While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
There are few ships ever built that don't sink when you ram them properly into rocks. I don't think that I have read a single article that faulted the shipbuilder for the disaster.
Can't wait for the battle of the Thames river between the British North Sea fleet (purchased from China) against the imperial Russian fleet (also purchased from China)
On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
Hopefully the Russians don't try and destroy the fishermen of Hull again.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident
You only need a small naval drone to down an entire ship.
Good thing that Japanese and South Korean shipbuilding industries exist
As long as the British people suffer, who am I to judge who built the boats.
See this video on the economics of shipbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
A fantastic long read on this issue from a Glaswegian perspective (2022): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-ste...
When you source out part of your production to a friendly nation, it's a cooperation. If you source it out to a non-friendly nation, this dependence is a liability.
General economic defeatism in this, and similar discussions, is staggering. Historically, many countries were suffering from various forms of economic malaise and managed to pull trough. Countries that lacked almost any form of industry have become powerhouses.
South Korea is a good example. The previous century hasn't been kind to Korea in general. By the 50s, the southern part of peninsula was generally less industrialized than the north, and recovering from horribly destructive war. Threat of another invasion from the north never went away.
And yet, successive governments have turned things around, and turned South Korea into advanced, functional, industrialized country. It has problems with aging population, but who hasn't?
West Germany in the second half of 20th century is another example. Devastated by war, occupied, mistrusted by neighbors, reliant on imported labor. And yet it put itself together. Lately it hasn't been doing so well, but for decades it was a model of prosperity.
Stories like this are abundant. Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of political courage. Politicians must be willing to withstand short term pain, and plan for the future. They must focus on long term prosperity, not on immediate popularity boosts.
Everyone here, I believe, agrees that the way things have been going is unsustainable and incredibly damaging to the very people it's meant to benefit. It can be fixed, it will take time, but it can be. Because it happened before.
You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come and gone. It is in many ways a failing state with no prospects for recovery. Across virtually every metric it looks bleak. And vague comments about withstanding short term pain and planning for the future ignores that they already tried that, and it didn’t work.
I think let's not forget that at the start of the period they mention, the UK (and British Empire) as a share of world GDP was larger than the US is today. It was clearly never going to be able to sustain that position.
Let's also not forget that the country effectively bankrupted itself during WWII. Investment from the Marshall Plan was basically used to prop up the currency which ultimately failed. There were 'balance of payments' crises well through into the 1970s when Bretton Woods collapsed.
Near everyone lost their shipping industry.
"As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive."
This feels like the US with longshoremen and coal
I do feel the cost of labour is DRASTICALLY understated. Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.
My last job, in oil and gas, on a large offshore vessel had I think 4000 people engaged in the shipyard during construction.
> Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them.
When you don't have a minimum wage, or your minimum wage is vastly lower than other competitors, it's far more efficient to hire more people than to invest in process improvements.
Even then, living costs in the US are quite bloated due to over-regulation
Labor in the US is extremely pricey because you have to keep the landlords happy
The cost of labour is DRASTICALLY overstated (except when it comes to executive pay then its apparently good value for money?), and the push/obsession with supernormal profits is DRASTICALLY understated.
I feel this explains our "productivity puzzle" quite well - A lack of infrastructure and R&D investment that is holding the UK back and really needs to be fixed.
I've struggled to understand exactly why our productivity is so bad here and I feel that this really explains it quite well - over reliance in tried and tested methods coupled with a lack of capital investment - for example relying on push-carts in the yards rather than looking at whatever was a more automated approach. It's not necessarily a case of a "productivity puzzle" but rather a puzzle as to why business owners aren't investing.
I got talking to a guy in the pub who told me about a local tire business, running completely on paper and manpower. In 2025 there's barely a hint of computers in the business. Seems like a similar story really. They could be making more sales, be more efficient, still employ people but redeploy to more useful roles. But no, a prevailing attitude of just carry on with pen and paper, and the MD can buy himself a flash new motor every year. When asked why the don't use technology it was like a fear of it, that they would be made redundant. I don't even mean AI, I mean even like a simple messaging system to IM from one side of the warehouse to another.
Mental.
There's a book on this subject by someone I follow which I must get round to reading: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-brompton/will-butler-ad...
It goes into a lot of detail on exactly how the process modernization happened in Brompton, with the sorts of challenges that you and the replies are talking about. The process and the workers need to adapt, in ways that the workers appreciate and fit the actual process of manufacture. Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
Ha, see what the unions have to say when you threaten the livelihoods of the poor downtrodden push card operatives, there will be placards and flaming braziers by the front gates before you can blink.
This frankly reads as somewhat sociopathic, not just anti-union.
In 2025 I admire anyone brave enough to take this position: are you independently wealthy?
If the MD is able to buy himself a flash motor every year, perhaps he doesn't have any incentive to improve the efficiency. Sounds like he's doing alright.
If you perceive your work to be artisanship (and a lot of people in the automotive and custom bicycle business do, along with people in the high end furniture business, for example), and you have enough customers who agree, and enough work to keep yourself and your employees busy and your families all fed, then a messaging system that speeds up productivity really is a lot of bollocks, basically (particularly for a company which is, in my experience of these amazing people, still disproportionately likely to hire people with dyslexia or reading difficulties). Because you cannot do more work of the same quality faster.
One thing tech people misunderstand is that these "artisanship" oriented companies can scale at least into the dozens of employees, almost all of whom want to do methodical uninterrupted skilled work or quiet, consistent labour, and who would rather hire four or five very understanding, very capable tech people to handle all that stuff for them. This is not a failing, it's a culture. Some great businesses in the UK run on the "don't add unnecessary tech bollocks" model, and IMO they should be encouraged to continue if they can, because that, it seems to me, is one route to surviving in an AI-bullshit-led industry.
The fact that the tech industry seems to thrill at systemically fucking this up and selling systems users do not need based on marketing fear that they are falling behind is quite depressing to me, not to mention a failure of systems analysis. Just because you are a tech person it doesn't mean you should be selling a messaging system to people who actually could just get the benefit from one more person to handle co-ordinating with the front office.
Tech people are, IMO, quite irresponsible in this way. We have all been trained to answer "we have a problem with X" questions with "we can build you a Y for that", when responsible consultancy would first rule out non-technical process flow improvements.
This is not Luddism. It is obvious that in skilled-work industries you should get things like "office-wide-instant-messengers" out of the way of people doing the skilled work so they can do it uninterrupted at an appropriate pace. There is no non-desk-bound job that is meaningfully improved by notifications buzzing.
I love how the capitalist laws of markets that instigated the rise of China as a the main ship builder - cheaper labor, automated production, low cost of all the source materials also coming from China - don't seem to apply for the people making the argument of protectional national strategic industries.
This is no different than any other industry. Unless you are on the cutting edge of a product where innovation is still being pushed, then your industry is going to be eaten up by China.
The UK at its peak was producing 1.4M in ship tonnage, now it produces zero. The US currently produces 69k in ship tonnage. China produces 37M in ship tonnage. Even if you can scale back to the historic peak, it's nowhere near enough. The difference between zero produced ships a year and 3 per year or 30 per year may as well be zero when China is producing 3 per day. It's over.
If we zoom out a bit the UK is a failed country.
All the industries in the UK are on the decline and most UK companies are being either sold off, shut down or are being owned (for a long time) by foreign companies.
It may take several decades for the UK to come back from this.
The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre.
I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples.
With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
The triple lock is a politically motivated policy which always grows the state pension (given to essentially all UK citizens and anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years) at a rate faster than earnings grow or faster than the economy grows. It will subsume the entire government budget.
Given the extremely high cost of energy, and housing in many places, younger people also seem to be opting out entirely. Disability payments the government pays are increasing at a rapid rate. (1 in 13 of the population are currently receiving this benefit).
> With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus.
What are you referring to here? Higher rates of income tax are only taken on the money earned over the band. So If you earn £50,271, you pay 20% on £50,270 and 40% on £1.
Are you referring to some other kind of tax then?
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
As well as the childcare benefit removal others have mentioned, you also begin losing your "tax free allowance".
The marginal tax rate for 100k -> 125k is 60% (due to losing the ~£12k tax free allowance)
After 100k, you get childcare benefit removed.
>anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years
To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension.
Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.
This is called mean reversion in history. The UK and Japan are small island countries. They lack the resources and manpower to sustain long-term industrial prosperity. Everything they have is temporary. In the end these industries flow to large nations with vast resources and large pools of technical talent. It used to be the United States. Now it is China absorbing Japan and Korea. This applies not only to shipbuilding but also to automobiles and all precision industries.
Seems a naive simplistic philosophy. The UK is larger than South Korea and has a similar population size. Yet South Korea has outcompeted the UK and US in ship building. By most accounts by investing in advanced technology and ship building technologies.
Having population and talented populous is a requirement but not sufficient for achieving big things. It requires leadership as well. Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
> Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
it wont last long. even china dont use military to take taiwan, china will still win on this in the the end. It's just a matter of time. A lead of a few decades doesn't mean everything from the perspective of historical dimensions, it's still too short.
also, china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.
So your solution to “Taiwan is outcompeting on silicon” is that the PLA Navy should take it by violent force and overthrow a peaceful nation and justify that calling that normal?
thats clear not what i said
Japan has always been an industrious, populous and quite productive country even back then (before the colonial era). It tops rankings on historical GDP. I agree to a certain degree about the UK, but even in this era of Japanese depression, they are still the world 3-4th most productive country.
yes but for now.if you analyze Japan's industrial data in detail, you'll find that they are in an unstoppable downward trend. Basically, all the industries they excel in, just like those in South Korea and Taiwan, are being replaced by China. Shipbuilding has become a game dominated by China(>50%) and Korea; home appliances, automotive industry, steel, chips, computers, and so on. Of course, right now, like in the automotive sector, Japan still holds an advantage in terms of volume, but everyone knows that electric vehicles are the future, and the core technology for the battery industry is almost entirely in China's hands. Even Tesla initially used Japanese technology, but they were ultimately surpassed by China. Relying on native protectionist strategies from the US and Canada, Japanese cars still have many advantages. But in open markets, Chinese electric vehicles are making inroads everywhere. Vietnam is gradually banning fuel-powered motorcycles, which is one of Japan's main products, but policy changes will allow Chinese electric vehicle brands and VinFast to capture more market share. We cannot predict exactly how long it will take for Japan's industry to completely exit the historical stage, but what we see is indeed a dying man. (Of course, Germany is already dead.)
so i wouldn't say 'always', even it can be reach to 100 years(unlikely). its a great achievement, but its not 'always'.
(Moreover, when predicting industrial trends, we must note that the future trend is robots. In this regard, due to China's vast population, the per capita number of robots hasn't yet reached the top spot, falling below Singapore and South Korea. But in terms of robot technology, I believe even the United States can't compare. Of course, in large models, the United States is still leading by a wide margin. So, determining how long China can rule industry in history, first of all, it will definitely be much longer than Britain and Japan, and another core reason is the decisive role of robots. If robots lead to the end of industrial transfer, then as long as China doesn't collapse for other reasons, China will forever have industrial advantages.)
ive long held this take aswell.
a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!"
but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence.
how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? on virtually every objective metric, it is off by an order of magnitude. frankly it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
>without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
London would be considerably poorer, there is an argument that the rest of the country may well be better off. The finance sector is our equivalent to the oil industry in Dutch Disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Specialization is the answer. The bigger you are, the more fields you can be competitive in. But even regions much smaller than the UK can be world leaders in something, if they choose to prioritize that and play their cards right.
> How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Because Shenzhen has access to the entire talent pool and supply chain and the consume market of China to support its development.
There is nothing preventing the UK from taking advantage of the talent pool, supply chain, and consumer market of an equally large economy in their chosen field. Except maybe the UK itself.
National borders are as important as you choose to make them. Small countries have always relied on diplomacy and trade to be successful. The UK just needs to accept that it's one small country among many, and start acting accordingly.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
German cars are a bit of joke these days in terms of reliability but their legacy and brand image is still keeping them afloat.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/used-car-brand-reliabil...
https://www.vibilagare.se/public/documents/2011/09/maskinska...
The car thing is in the distant past, we were making 2 million cars a year in the 2010's (at least until Brexit).
Their USP was their empire, a source of free raw materials.
I don't think so. It certainly did not hurt but there is another major factor: The UK is the house where the industrial revolution was born. And they still have the scars from it. And I think that is in part why they lost it: they were ahead but with fairly primitive stuff and then others overtook them because they didn't have that heritage to maintain and keep up. Just have a look at the London subway for an excellent example of why being early out of the gate with stuff like that isn't always the best in the long run.
Some more examples: Some countries in Africa are now ahead in mobile usage for all kinds of official stuff including payments, insurance and government interaction. Countries that were late to adapt to mobile infrastructure ended up with 4G or better where as the rest is having trouble phasing out their 3G networks because they've become invisibly dependent on them.
The British used to export cotton from the colonies, process them in England and then ship them back.
I don't have the links handy but they taxed the colonies multiple times over both while exporting and reimporting.
Without the colonies they would have been nothing.
I've read a book called Four Hundred Years In America before; I don't know if its English version is popular. It points out that one core reason for the South's defeat in the Civil War was how vital the cotton trade between the American South and Britain was to both sides. So the North used their fleet to blockade the South's cotton exports to Britain right away, leaving the South without the trade revenue to import steel and other materials needed for building railroads—basically sealing their fate. Britain just pivoted to sourcing cotton from places like India, still not relying on local production. This example really drives home how Britain's industrial foundation was way too dependent on raw material inflows from the colonies.
I haven't read the book you referenced but there are many articles which say essentially the same thing. In addition, there are some historians who claim the British created the conflict in an attempt to partition the US into north and south, a trick they used almost everywhere they went. Matt Ehret for one.
India is the most prominent example, to tiny Cyprus.
Are you OK? You seem to have issues with when to capitalise letters. Understandable when English is a second language and you have a lot more forums to piss on.
"how could the UK ever compete with China" - What is the point? China isn't really that important. It's handy for cheap stuff but nothing else.
Worst comment I’ve ever read on hn
Here's your trophy, Sir. Indeed China is irrelevant, you are so right!
holy cope
> it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
This is a virtual advantage, which is being eroded as we speak.
Thanks to the overuse of sanctions, many countries have already switched to bilateral currencies.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
That is simply not true. UK and Japan are big enough to compete in specific sectors. The problem is the entire world gifted China their manufacturing ability and then gave up. Climate policy, short term economic thinking and unions all worked together to destroy the west manufacturing capability.
"This is called mean reversion in history."
Citation? I tried a search on your term and ... crickets.
EDIT:
Sorry: "Mean reversion is a financial term for the assumption that an asset's price will tend to converge to the average price over time"
What on earth does that have to do with the price of frogs?
If you google "reversion to the mean" or "regression to the mean" you'll see a more general definition.
Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.
The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.
What makes no sense is infinite growth and the "west" is starting to find out
TLDR: Failed to innovate and adapt.
In a way it is story that repeats itself on a larger scale as a whole with the western world.
One of the things that annoys me is that the west lost the opportunity to continue to be world's manufacturing powerhouse in the 90s and early 00s. We should have invested in automation and efficiency to the point where developing countries even if using slave labor and no environmental regulations to still not be able to compete on price of end product. It is not as if there was not substantial technological advantage at the time.
If there was going to be a rust belt - well it is better if jobs were outright destroyed/obsoleted than moved to other countries.
Meanwhile the UK did give us the web and the CPUs we all use.
Some was lost. Some was freely given; Thatcher was no fan of shipbuilders.
It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments:
> I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
I grew up in the UK and it felt like everyone of my parent's generation had stories like that. My father was in management and had to go toe-to-toe with a union that was on the verge of wiping out his industry (private sector TV), they were doing things like shutting down transmissions as part of demanding higher wages. In that specific case the unions failed as the TV companies were able to automate the transmission suites and then fired all the workers, this was in the 1980s I think when the legal environment was more conducive to that. Funny story: one of the fired workers moved to the US and ended up writing a popular series of thriller books that ended up being turned into a movie series, he became very rich in the process. So the union failing ended up being good for that guy in the end.
But in many industries they weren't able to beat the unions thanks to a series of very weak left wing governments in the 50s, 60s and 70s (even the Conservatives were weak on labour until Thatcher) that largely made opposing the unions illegal. So the industries just got wiped out one by one. Today the same problem exists but with Net Zero instead of unions, it makes electricity so expensive that industry becomes uncompetitive vs parts of the world where they don't care, and the political class is fine with this outcome. Decades and decades of governments that cheered on deindustrialization for left wing ideological reasons.
So whilst the shipping industry probably did have problems in management (just like the car/steel industry), ultimately having good management wouldn't have helped. What determined if an industry survived this period or not was whether the management was able to automate fast and completely enough to break union power.
The main reason the car industry couldn't hack it is because of quality issues. There was this joke sticker for the back of your Jaguar or Rolls: "The parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture".
I worked a lot on classic Mini's, Metros and Maxi's. The degree to which body work had been patched and bent to match it to the corresponding chassis was quite amazing. Rumor had it the Leyland factory had a guy with a very large hammer standing at the end of the line to 'adjust' the doors if they didn't close properly. I totally believe it. I've seen almost new subframes that were Swiss cheese from rust and/or with very bad welding.
That said, there are few cars that are more fun to drive than a souped up Classic Mini, and even fewer that would be as lethal in an accident.
Quality issues are inevitable if the unions see their role as preventing anyone from getting fired.
Which, it should be noted, is not a common goal among unions.
I’m a union metalworker in the US shipbuilding industry— our products are expensive, but in very high demand domestically and internationally. That’s true for various reasons, but in no small part because our quality is exceptional, and people regularly get fired for compromising it. Some unions do seem to strive to protect incompetence at all costs, but none of the ones I worked for in any industry ever defended it. I have a feeling the cases where they do are heavily influenced by shakedowns and corruption rather than being genuinely that tribal. Some police unions probably fall on both sides of that spectrum.
How can union rules get crafted to keep the company in business, fire incompetence, and breed innovation, rather than self-perpetuation?
Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.
Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.
And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.
Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.
A union is functionally a business which sells labor. It's usually structured so that sales are indirect, with their customers paying the workers directly, but that's just accounting.
There's no fundamental reason that a union should seek to prevent anyone from ever getting fired, anymore than any other business would see to prevent any of their employees from being fired. Likewise, there's no fundamental reason that unions should be bad for the businesses that hire their members. A prosperous client is good for business.
Some unions are badly run and hurt themselves. Americans especially tend to assume all unions are this way, partly because of some high-profile examples, partly because of a culture of individualism and association of unions with communism, and partly because of propaganda. But they definitely do not have to be like that.
Cars like Jaguar and Land Rover have famously bad electrical systems. But just saying quality issues doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country, and its the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to, there has to be a deeper reason. I don’t know it unions were the whole story, as really only Germany or Germanic countries have ever had great quality control for cars in Europe, but there must be some systemic reason.
There are lots of manufacturers in the UK right now who have fantastic quality. Rolls Royce aero engines. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Airbus wings and landing gear. Lots of cars as well. Medical devices. The list is endless.
The UK manufacturing sector was worth $279 billion in the last year.
https://www.makeuk.org/insights/reports/uk-manufacturing-fac...
That's all true. But the list could have been a lot longer. The UK had a lot more industry than it does today and there definitely were quality issues. At the same time: competition that wasn't even on the horizon back then (for instance: Korea) became a major factor and at some point you need the scale. For the UK driving on the left side of the road made that all of their exports had to be made for domestic or foreign use, foreign manufacturers often chose to simply not field a model in the UK, so that was an extra cost.
It's funny, I've a complete love/hate relationship with cars from the UK. I love them, love the looks, love to drive them. But I hate the unreliability that was part and parcel of it and I hated even more to buy a spare part and then to find out that it subtly didn't fit because of some defect in body geometry with as a result that it looked like crap (fenders... subframes... don't get me started on that one, I can bore you to death about the kind of crap they sold).
The Metro could have been what the 206 was for Peugeot, instead they made fairly nice design in the most cheap and unsafe way possible. In comparison the 206 was a little tank.
> Bad quality at one company is one thing, but if you’re arguing bad quality happened across a whole industry or country
There's a culture in industries. As you said, look at Germany. Look at the culture in SV - it would be hard to open a development business of any size that ran completely against the SV engineering culture.
> the country that started the industrial revolution and could come up with the Rolls Royce Merlin when it needed to
That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history. :)
> I don’t know it unions were the whole story
Looking at the two countries with the best reputations for quality, a lack of union and labor projection may be the problem: Germany has very strong unions; in many cases, they get a seat on the board of directors. Japan treats its labor very well - often lifetime jobs, famously Toyota empowers assembly line workers to stop the entire line themselves - and has low labor market liquidity (but my info on Japan could be out of date).
"That is almost literally ancient history. Nearly Medieval history".
What absolute rubbish.
Rolls Royce is one of the leading aero engine makers today. They make the engines for the 787 and the A350, and many other planes.
"Laborers wanted their fair slice of the pie so the bosses moved all industries and investments to Asia."
"Why did the laborers do this?"
Erm, British management is also famously terrible.
Coal has horrible externalities and its demise is a good thing.
British iron ore is not very rich, and it never was; Britain has imported iron ore since the 19th century. Given how cheap it is to ship iron by sea, it's very hard to justify using low-grade ore that has to be moved by rail.
Because of the large size of the manufacturers, a medium-size country will only have a couple of them, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement like what happened at British Leyland, AMC, Chrysler, Nissan, ...
"The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong".
That's the conventional wisdom, but is it true?
It was the Thatcher government that shut down those industries. Maybe they didn't need to. There was a lot of collateral damage, privately owned suppliers that went bankrupt etc. A lot of countries have state subsidised industries, including the USA. GM was bailed out by the Obama government. Boeing and Tesla and SpaceX get tons of government money..
There is an interesting book by Tim Lankester, who was the chief economist in the Thatcher government. He has mixed feelings.
If you are interested, the book is:
Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Experiment by Tim Lankester
Blame the workers, it’s absolute bullshit (apologies for language).
My view is privatization opened up the British market to globalization, and fundamentally once everyone is trying to get things for the cheapest price the domestic supply chain shrinks, in the UK it has shrunk to the point it vanished. Other countries with stronger protection for domestic production (like the US with the Jones act and dredging acts, Norway) avoided exposure to the global market and survived.
Jeopardy style, Who is Lee Child?
> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result.
And yet Germany, the great success story of retaining manufacturing in a western developed country, had and has far stronger leftists and far stronger unions than the UK. So evidently this was not the reason at all, although I'm sure getting the public to think it was is very useful to certain monied interests.
> By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift.
Note that a work-to-rule is a dispute escalation tactic, one step down from a full-on strike. This was not routine activity.
There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy.
The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.
Yes, but in the end you still live in physical reality, and this determines our actual productivity.
Whether we can make a boat, or a tennis racket, or a toothbrush cheaply is in the end what determines how many people can have boats, tennis rackets and toothbrushes, not whether the service economy, or our scientific research is excellent. We can hope to be able to do neat stuff and trade that for products, but in the end, once trade is no longer mandatory when people do not need to obtain foreign currency to obtain oil, everything having become battery-electric, I suspect that everybody will be better off simply building what they want.
This is economic myopia that leads to long term subservience to countries which have maintained manufacturing capability. China can literally bring the rest of the developed world to their knees at will with rare earths.
There's lots of rare earth deposits all over the world, but the question is, are you willing to accept the pollution that results from extracting them as efficiently as possible?
China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
China dominates refining, which is also a nasty industry. The mining is done in many places.
> China's "If it develops a market, yes" answer to that is their strategic advantage.
i.e. long term thinking is their strategic advantage.
Unfortunately, neoliberal bullshit only works out the long term in a political fantasy world.
It’s easy for a small group to seize the benefits when productivity is centralized in the hands of a small group. If you diversify the ability to build boats, then you may not be rich, but you’ll have a boat.
The increase in wealth concentration mostly happened after ship-building (and other manufacturing) departed.
The US (and maybe the EU) are currently in the process of destroying their knowledge-based economy in the pursuit of dust manufacturing. The reason China is willing to negotiating with the US or the EU is because of massive leverages these countries have when it comes to the monopoly of the knowledge and information economy. If China could turn on a switch and become independent, they'd do it. They can't and it's interesting that the US/EU are not happy with this superior status quo and would rather return to a pre-1900 world where they are the sole center of the world.
It's not going to work, in my opinion; and it's going to end with them having neither. You being downvoted shows that this is not the opinion of the elite only but everyone is onboard the insanity train.