How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
construction-physics.com134 points by surprisetalk 12 hours ago
134 points by surprisetalk 12 hours ago
Not a single mention of the Thatcher government in the 1970s, that sold off public-owed industries like British Coal and British Steel, and then set about acquiring and breaking up the shipyards themselves for scrap.
All of it was worth more smashed up and sold for scrap, for the little quick "fix" that the Money Junkies in the Conservative government wanted. Unemployment and poverty rose steadily except for the bankers and politicians, the UK lost just about all forms of skilled industry, and by 1987 it was all over with the Stock Market Crash that obliterated the economy.
We've had about 45 years of Tory misrule and right now there are no political parties prepared to effect any improvement. It's all bleating about how "illegal immigrants in small boats" are costing billions, but no real breakdown of where the money is going.
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.
The is rarely some kind of inherent cultural or socioeconomic failing on the part of the producers, it's more often a failure of institutional will and a failure of scale.
Take any product that you actually produce well in Scotland for X Euros per unit in M months, scale production down by 99.9%, wait 20 years for them to lay everybody off, sell off all the factories, start relying on more and more stockpiled or imported parts and overseas labor, sell off important subsidiaries, and just generally become a shell of an industry.
Now build another one using domestic labor and parts, demanding competitive bids and constant redesigns and calling executives into the legislature to harangue them for failures and tell them the budget is closed for this year because of their delays, and now tell me what coefficient I have to tack on to N and M.
This is the problem with destroying industries then trying to keep small remaining pockets of it/restarting it. You lose all of the institutional knowledge, the stuff that isn't written down, the stuff that comes from experience.
This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs.
You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.
I have no real opinion on this debate but wouldn't the person you are responding to say that the explosion of budget and lengthening of timeline is exactly because those capacities had been abandoned ?
But I agree it's a good question, how much inefficiency can you accept to revive a branch of industry, how long do you have to wait before you decide to throw the towel ?
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.
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.
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?
Maybe, but it has to be balanced against the economic damage of autarkic policies which sabotages national security in its own way. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.
The sensible thing would be deep integration with a continent-spanning economy. Sure the UK is an island, but the channel isn't exactly wide (not to mention the tunnel). It's hardly Iceland - even Ireland is more detached.
But the UK decided against that in 2016, and despite demographics having shifted the views, there is no general "rejoin" campaign.
I've wondered about this too. I live in the UK and have been idly daydreaming about my next startup, and it seems like Brexit, and therefore having a small market / uncooperative EU, is such a headwind for some of the things I'd like to do. Seems like many UK startups just pretend to be based in SF.
I think rejoin is going to be politically unpopular for a while, as there's no way we could rejoin the EU on anything like as good terms as we left on.
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's a country that is also a capitalist economy. Ofcourse they can build cargo ships. But those ships will be ten times more expensive than anything you can buy from Korea.
Who is going to make up the difference?
The idea is that, if it's that important, you ultimately fund it from taxation. It's so important that it's really defence spending.
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.
If the people who have the most to lose don't think that something is in the national interest, then is it really?
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
It's the old world old money version of cashing out your tech bucks and retiring to Colorado.
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.
"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.
>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).
Australia has ranked choice voting and mandatory voting. What else could be done to “give” people more choices?
> 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.
Neither was Jeremy Corbyn, but he would have been Prime Minister if enough people had voted for him. Say what you will about him (I am not a fan), but he is not “establishment approved”.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Small island countries shouldn't build their own ships only because they can't due to their size. But they probably should have sovereign manufacturing of asymmetric deterrence tools like anti-ship missiles.
Friends aren't good enough, unless you have a mutual defense treaty, they aren't real friends and can't be counted on. Look at Ukraine struggling to get Tomohawks and ATACMS now, or struggling to get tanks and jets, due to fear of escalation.
> Friends aren't good enough
They are if you actively manage your relationships with an eye to maintaining redundant access to necessary materiel or having multi-pronged defense strategies. Singapore is constantly nurturing strategic defense ties with multiple allies and attempting to avoid existential reliance on any single ally. And the one nation they definitely wouldn't rely on is Malaysia, the country most likely to threaten their sovereignty. Ukraine's problem was they were politically too dysfunctional and dependent on Russia defense trade until Russia's successive invasions forced them to reform domestically. (To be fair, Russia had a hand in prolonging their dysfunction.)
I think there's a lot of nuance, because the right move will depend on exactly what specific item we are talking about, combined with local factors, and this answer will vary from country to country. No country should be fully autarkic even for the defense supply chain, that much we agree on. That said, the principles that you've laid out, such as seeking redundancy, are universally good ones to follow for the non-autarkic parts of the supply chain.
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.
It's about a thousand ships, but realsitically it's very fuzzy, with flags of convenaince and all. And British companies own a _lot_ of ships, just flagged under other countries.
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.
Maybe not legally, but most of the countries used as a flag of convenience are tiny, what could the Marshall islands do about it?
You've got to go up the chain - protect steelmaking, too. And ultimately, where does the iron ore come from?
Not saying you're wrong (idk either way), saying that to do it right is a big pivot.
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", because he doesn't serve his people, they serve him.
Too bad it's hard to find a country which isn't autocratic by this standard in practice.
> 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.
Right, it's sometimes hard to see the difference with democracy and authoritarianism if you never experienced the latter.
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)
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.
That's around 100 torpedoes loaded in the water. Is that enough to break a blockade?
And my point is it's not about a physical blockade.
If you buy your ships from half way around the world, then the shipyards can be destroyed before you get anywhere near them. And certainly now preventing that is politically commiting to a war on the other side of the planet which may not immediately effect you, but is likely to eventually.
But the other part is: you don't have to physically do anything. You could deny shipping to your opponent by someone just outbidding you for the output. Why not? You're already outsourcing so you're cost sensitive, and guaranteed volume is cat nip to manufacturers - no amount of strategic alliance wording is going to save you if an adversary reliably buys 10x as much.
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.
Um... Russia's doctrine during the Cold War was to turn Poland into a nuclear wasteland to stop Nato advancing through it. At the time, Poland was a part of the USSR.
What Russia considers "a buffer zone" is really "inferior peoples we can atomise without having to open a new conflict with a foreign power." To be clear, I use the term "inferior peoples" as seen from the Russian point of view.
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
Voted up just for the reference to Yes Prime Minister, one of the UK's best contributions to political education and entertainment.
On the other hand, there's Sir Humphrey's opinion on Trident.
"It's the nuclear deterrent Harrods would sell."
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.
I never understood this line of thinking. It doesn't matter if graft ruined 95% of Russia's nukes. Your city is still gone.
That is nonsense. Even if (optimistically) 90% are nonoperational, what it would change?
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.
While I generally agree with your point presenting Russia as a decision making entity is dangerously misleading. You're not dealing with democracy or even 1970s committee-run USSR anymore.
Sure Putin has broad support and a number of companions but he remains unilateral, undisputed, unchallenged decision maker. Assuming otherwise brings you back into the fold of rational actor argument which has proven a fallacy for some time now. Yes Putin is not suicidal today, although the chances he'll outlive total retaliation strike. But he may feel differently tomorrow, waking up in a bad mood.
Direct kinetic war between nuclear powers is pretty much unthinkable - mutual annihilation if either core territory is threatened. Instead, wars happen through proxies or direct attacks on non-nuclear powers, and then you need the ability to project power short of a nuclear response.
Russia can't prevent aid to Ukraine with nuclear blackmail. The US can't defend Taiwan without ships - it can't use nuclear blackmail itself. And if it doesn't defend Taiwan, not only is Western prosperity threatened, but the entire structure of allies that the US built after WW2 crumbles into a chaos of small parties more easily picked apart.
Pursuing total defeat is unthinkable, but not pursuing limited gains with clear signalling to the enemy about the objectives.
We just had a direct kinetic war between nuclear powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India–Pakistan_conflict
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.
Bah, I'm of the opinion that if the intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel, that might well be an improvement.
But I do think that you're right in that the time of the frigate and aircraft carrier is over, and we'll all more likely to die either from a nuclear missile or from a 50 gram autonomous drone. I agree: the national security argument is hollow.
There are other reasons to build ships though, and some degree of self-sufficiency is always sensible.
Nuclear weapons are overrated. Multiple countries already invaded a nuclear power (1973 Yom Kippur War) and nothing happened. If Egypt wasn't afraid of nukes, what makes you so confident that your future enemy will be?
It's an empathy gap. You are rightly cautious of nukes, but you then project that mindset onto belligerents, which is the mistake. A very important rule in strategic planning is to avoid projecting your own calculations onto the enemy.
Even nuclear powers need to meet the pacing challenge and be able to win, or at least be able to have enough asymmetric capabilities in the arsenal to add to deterrence, and force a frozen conflict if necessary.
>>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.
>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".
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.
In my most cynical moments I think if the UK actually wants to build ships the best thing to do might be to close down the existing shipbuilding industry first, and start a newer more efficient one from scratch.
Per Ferguson Marine, do you want to prop up a dying industry or achieve usable ships? What's the actual priority?
To add to that, we just won a £10bn contract to build Type 26 anti-sub frigates for Norway https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5rgdpvn63o
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
The UK does not even make any effort. Look at the level of dependency on US cloud providers to deliver basic government services. To be fair, the UK is no worse than the rest of Europe (some small gestures and exceptions aside) in this, but that only makes the overall situation worse.
Successive British governments have not really thought this through, and what dependencies are a problem. Again, not the only country that has done that, but, again, that does not help solve the problem.
> 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.
Absolutely, but people are not aware of it, politicians do not care, the the ruling class are declinist.
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.
> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.
So the simple truth is you can almost never "ignore the cost" because that cost must be borne somewhere. And there's always someone that's considered "national-strategic" by someone. Hell, I recall my dad being enraged that our "blue" passports are now manufactured in Poland under contract from a French company. What actually happened is De La Rue took the piss on their contract bid thinking they would just rinse the taxpayer.
Having the taxpayer there to bail out a failing shipyard blunts the incentive to modernise which, as we can see from the article, was barely there to begin with. Should the taxpayer sit there with effectively unlimited liability to build these ships? Should that come at the expense of, say, funding for the NHS? Housebuilding? Fixing our crumbling prison system? Modernising our water infrastructure?
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"
Australia's naval strategy is to defend our sea lanes that we rely on for trade, primarily our trade with our largest customer, which is China.
Conveniently, they need what we have, and we want what they make.
On the other hand, the primary strategic threat is apparently also China.
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 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.
The trade off is worth making. It gives you the ability to survive if things go wrong in return for being slightly worse off in the meantime.
> 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
It can also mean very little more stuff. Part of the problem with our current system is that we will import rather than produce because its very slightly cheaper.
It would be ridiculous for the UK to grow its own tea, however it would be perfectly reasonable for it to aim to produce more of its own basic foodstuffs.
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.
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?
>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?
Someone else starts their own mines, everyone goes a little poorer.
except for oil, most countries aren't dependant on other countries just to survive in the near term (food is one of the few things countries will usually attempt to ensure they are selfsufficent in, if it's feasible)
>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?
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.
I didn't know that. That's actually impressive, both strategically and in terms of our readiness and capability.
That puts Jakarta in range. I'm sure the Indonesian military took note as well.
Plus we've got Tomahawks now, that's 2500km range, sea launched.
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.
Which is why Australia is re-orienting its defence by moving towards missiles, UAVs, USVs, while still being lumbered with AUKUS.
It's also shoring up diplomacy with Japan, South Korea, was trying to with India, when Biden was attempting to move India away from China.
The future wars are going to be mostly unmanned and Australia will need hyper-local defence, so has to be low cost and easily deployed.
> Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?
A democratically elected, competent government I would imagine.
Ehh, I think the reason we have less wars in Europe the last decades is because we're all connected now.
The UK imports half its food, and was almost starved into submission by Nazi U-boats during WW2,, so you’d think they would know this, but laissez-faire ideology is strong in the ruling class.
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.
Not quite the conclusions of the article. As it points out the UK nationalised its shipbuilding industry in the 70s in a last ditch effort to turn it around, and despite operating it at a significant loss for a decade failed to make it even slightly competitive. In the 90s the industry was then privatised again once it was clear there was no saving it anymore.
For the vast majority of its history the UK shipbuilding industry was completely private, and dominated by many small shipbuilders. Consolidation only started after the UK government stepped in to provide some kind of sensible strategy to improve the competitiveness of the industry, via government loans tied to longer term strategic goals to improve productivity.
Ultimately it seems that the UK shipbuilding industry was kill by the thing that once made it so dominant. It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products. But as the world moved towards standardisation, those strengths became weaknesses.
The lack of management structure made it impossible for the industry to properly recognise the issues, or effect change to fix the issues. And the world moved towards standardisation, which gave a huge advantage to shipbuilders that built up capital intensive infrastructure that allowed the use of lower skilled labour to produce standard design quick, cheaper, and to a higher quality, than the UK distributed, high skill, labour force.
It's important to note that nationalising ship building was a last-ditch parachute for hundreds of thousands of manual workers, not the cause of its decline.
Decades of state subsidy of it both directly and of its suppliers had failed and taking it on was far cheaper for the country than letting it and British Steel, and the National Coal Board all simultaneously fail.
> It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products.
... That sounds a lot like the Norwegian shipbuilding industry which I work for right now. Maybe not with little management exactly, but nothing crazy either - significantly less than a British multinational I worked for earlier. Of course the hulls are built elsewhere, and half of my colleagues are foreigners, but we're going fairly strong.
So I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Why wouldn't the British do management equally well as us?
From the article re: Norwegian customers:
"…every reported speech by a British shipbuilder in the Norwegian press usually comprised a list of excuses for poor performance, ranging from official and unofficial stoppages, shortages of labour, failings on the part of subcontractors, modernisation schemes not producing the anticipated results, to recently completed contracts having entailed substantial losses. The impression thus gained by the Norwegians, according to Holt, was of an industry where the shipbuilders had no control or responsibility over problems, and worse, had no ideas as to how to address the problems"
I do think that British mismanagement plays a big role in the decline of the 1970s. I don't think it's a coincidence that the surviving car industry consists of two types of companies:
- small bespoke high end companies like McLaren, with British management but comparatively small staff and throughput;
- former British marques which are now being run more competently by foreigners (Jaguar Land Rover etc)
My working theory is that British management over large groups of British workers collapses into class warfare.
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.
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
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.
It feels like the British establishment is particularly good at one thing: Being pragmatic enough to stay in power.
That appears to take precedence over anything else. It may have "saved" the UK from revolutions or major clearouts of its governing structures and legal system, and results in a system that is delightlyfully quirky on the surface.
But it's also a way of governing that seems to lead to managing decline over fixing things because managing decline is less risky in the short term.
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.
If you think the British Empire was ever competent then I strongly recommend you listen to the episodes of the Empire podcast that cover the British Empire (there’s a lot of different episodes across the series).
With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.
That said, I don’t think it’s unique to Britain. The Roman Empire has many tales of staggering incompetence and wild idiocy throughout its expansion. If you have the time, The History of Rome is an excellent podcast that covers the entire time period.
I suspect it’s the truth of human nature that it isn’t possible for such large organisations to be competent throughout, just by virtue of how many people they take to operate.
> With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.
Hm. Well, I can't say I know any better than that, I was rather assuming that becoming the biggest empire was itself due to something approximating competence.
Certainly, if one takes the view that all large organisations are mediocre, the British Empire is unambiguously an example of "large organisation".
Edit:
Just to check, the Empire podcast by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple?
> Certainly, if one takes the view that all large organisations are mediocre, the British Empire is unambiguously an example of "large organisation".
Absolutely! I think all governments can safely fall under "large organisation" as it's pretty much necessary.
> Just to check, the Empire podcast by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple?
That's the one.
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 then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
Nuclear energy belongs in the "unaffordable industries which failed to adapt" category. They could have maybe eventually reconciled with the safety question and the weapons question, but getting undercut by renewables means that's the way forwards to green energy.
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
> Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
Which is a policy choice that people were pretty clear on when they bought the policies in. That is basically the only way to get a negative learning curve on an exciting new tech like nuclear. Bet you that China is seeing a more natural learning curve.
China seem to be following a "yes and" policy for power: demand is so huge that they're just building all possible types of generation to avoid bottlenecking the construction of any one in particular. Even they seem to have slowed slightly on nuclear since Fukushima and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (who were supplying one of the designs).
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 blitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz), the collapse of the British car industry (which, primarily affected Coventry) and then the closing of the coal mines leading to lower income tax money to the council 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.
>>I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation
I live in the UK and not in London either, and it constantly feels like everything is just decaying and the country lives in the past not the present. Everything is just dilapidated, falling apart, or shut down. The streets are full of rubbish, dirty and local infrastructure doesn't get fixed up for months if someone damages it. Local councils are saying they will shut down care homes soon because there is no money for anything. And it's not even a private vs state funded issue - our local pharmacy literally looks like something out of afganistan, you walk in and there is actual dirty carpet on the floor, the shelves are 50% empty and there are several broken lights in the ceiling - with 4 people working behind the counter packing prescriptions. And that's operated by a private company! Which I believe is only doing it because they are required by an NHS contract, otherwise they would have shut the place down. And don't even get me started on the NHS - a friend with suicidal thoughts was told he needs to see a psychiatrist, the current wait time for one is 260 weeks(just short of 5 years). Honestly if I were cynical I'd say the system prefers if he kills himself, less of a burden.
Honestly, I feel so weird. One one hand, I work from home on a tech worker salary and I'm very comfortable financially - but I take a step out of my house and you don't feel like the 5th wealthiest nation in the world. Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that? And honestly I don't think even 3rd world countries are closing down libraries, it's just unthinkable.
I'm very jaded about it, I keep trying to find positives and there are some but generally I've learnt to expect that things are broken, forgotten or just in poor state in some way or another, because there is never any money to do anything. It's a poor country cosplaying as a superpower.
Poor country through which a lot of wealth passes, or is held. But there's also a lot of very British defeatism. A sort of squashed spirit which is against the possibility that things might be better, because then they'd be different. And of course the easy blame on foreigners.
I do think there used to be more middle class public/civic pride, and you can see this in some places that have retained it and cleaned themselves up. I see the various "transition towns" (Totnes, Bristol etc) as one way forward: they have a vision of a future involving local people, not just a vision of the past.
> Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that?
Closing things down in order to avoid having to put up taxes is extremely first world behavior now.
Europe? I'm building high tech vessels in Europe right now. Even most of the hulls are made in Europe.
Are you sure this isn't about Britain, and how the finance industry gave that county its own version of "Dutch disease", making it comparatively unprofitable to do anything but managing assets?
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.
Colonies disappeared quickly post ww2. US imperialism did continue strongly for a while with Cia/political meddling to allow American companies to continue resource extraction.
" 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
> This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia.
When France built their nuclear programs, or railways, it was a massive investment, the people in charge when these decisions were taken were long gone by the time the projects were completed. It wasn't seen as a cost but as a national interest, now we're cutting everything down because everything is seen as a short term cost regardless of the long term benefits.
> I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure.
Nations don't matter, the 10 or so people truly in charge do, when they have a spine at least, now that we have business men thinking about the next quarter it's more complicated.
> Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years
History doesn't just happen... countries with long term visions make history, of course if you check out of the race you're at the mercy of whatever other people decide for you. China didn't automagically get where it is today, the planned economy helps in that regard.
In Europe, we are in the middle of a very expensive and long term decarbonization push, an order of magnitude (if not two) more expensive that what France did. In fact, it is so expensive that the question if we can even pull it off is still open.
That does not seem to support your idea that "everything gets cut down over short term costs now". There is a massive amount of long term spending happening right now.
Oh sure we do spend, on foreign tech, foreign factories, &c. That's not what I call long term vision, if anything it's the opposite. Germany was Putin's bitch because of gas, now the whole EU will be China's bitch for panels and batteries, amazing!
FYI: China produces >70% of windmills blades, solar panels and lithium batteries
What I meant by vision is securing the long term independence of your country through home grown technologies, for example France got cheap/clean electricity and nukes from their program. What you're describing is just the continuity of the lack of vision we had since the 70s, we outsourced everything to Asia and kept "services", which aren't worth much when shit hits the fan.
there are reason why most advance country move to service based economy than manufacturing
1. manufacturing doesnt scale
2. in peace time, globalization is really good with no downside. while factory is not in the western soil. the owner is still largely western company
I think a lot of it is because after world war 2 the labour government decided that a centralised planned economy and nationalisation of every business (and I do mean every, this was in labours manifesto until new labour in the 90s) would perform better. It didn't work, it destroyed industries.
This gives some idea of what happened: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUgYWRhbSBzbWl...
Jm2c, but this sort of problems would've been smaller if the UK stayed in the EU. Then you can do this sort of strategic planning on a larger scale as the EU tends to promote economical activities that make sense for specific countries.
The EU, while not subsidizing ship building per se, it did subsidize the R&D.
Ship building subsidies are banned in the EU for a very specific reasons: from the 70s to the early 90s European ship builders could not stay competitive with the asian ones.
This led France, Spain, UK, Germany into a race of subsidies that:
1. created a lot of overcapacity
2. tanked prices
3. didn't make shipyards more, but *less* competitive with their asian counterparts, as they had less reasons to invest with the guarantee of minimal effort and guaranteed money
This is really a damn if you do, damn if you don't situation for which there are no real solutions.
We lack the materials, we lack the energy, even if we stepped up to the great levels of efficiency of Japanese/Korean/Chinese ship building have (and we're unlikely to do, it's not just a technological but cultural challenge), we'd still not be able to compete on costs (energy, materials, labor) and R&D (the asian dragons produce way more engineers in the sectors than we do).
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.
Great video. I came across it a few weeks ago and I was surprised how much the financing from the Asian governments mattered in shaping the industry
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.
England is an island, both geographically and culturally. This is the culture from where Brexit comes.
They still think that the world spins around their navel, that football (soccer) is their game and the sun never sets in their empire.
At the end of WWI, 4 empires collapsed: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian tzar, the Ottoman Empire and the British. The Austrians accepted it and moved on. The Russians and Turkish are in denial and resisting to accept what they already know. The British didn't even get the memo, they're totally oblivious, in a "Downtown Abbey" fantasy.
> While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
Bullshit. People know about Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Maseratti, Ducati, Beretta (guns), Carpiggiani (ice-cream machines), La Marzocco, De Longhi (espresso machines), etc.
They can build faster and cheaper in Asia. Something the Netherlands learned after they threw a lot of money at it trying to save the shipyard industry.
Just accept heavy industry is over and find new ways to make money. You will never out build Asians but you can out bullshit them and nobody bullshits better than the Dutch!
The Chinese are moving up the chain.
If the Dutch thing they can make money just being a middle man they are in for a surprise.
Just like the telecom industry found out.
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.
They'll all sink when they crash in to the dumped Lime bike reef (purchased from China)
As long as the British people suffer, who am I to judge who built the boats.
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.
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.
Over large, historical periods of time no empire resisted. So, the fact that UK was a great empire is an argument that they will decline in the next immediate period.
That being said, "success" stories appear as much as "failures", and many times on/from the ruins of previous empires.
The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline.
In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis.
The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well.
Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well.
Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace.
Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier.
There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News).
Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
Beautifully said.
We are punching way above our weight in arts (disproportionally many Hollywood actors and directors are British), complex engineering (off the top of my head, Rolls Royce, Sheffield Forgemasters, and BAE are good examples), and recently building alliances (Japan's JASDF just made their first European deployment in 71 years). We are unusually constitutionally resilient, still maintaining control of the legislature over the executive, which is becoming rarer and rarer in the west.
But below all of that is bubbling energy and drive to fix and improve things. I saw it at startup meetups, I saw it in thinktanks, I saw it at Labour Conference. I see it in your comment.
There are massive risks to navigate, but I'm optimistic about this country's future.
I think the defeatism is generally because there seems to be no way out. The two winning approaches right now are Starmer's “radical change through stability and continuity” and Farage's “Brexit 2: This time with Elon Musk”. Both strategies have clearly failed in the past.
"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.
Near everyone lost their shipping industry.
This article radically downplays the role that unions had in killing the UK shipbuilding industry.
While it's true that shipbuilders were reluctant to introduce new technologies and techniques due to capital requirements, the much bigger reason they did not was the impediment put up by unions. Yes, capital expenditure is painful in a cyclical industry, but in previous eras of shipbuilding, companies did invest in modernization ... in those previous eras, unions were much less active or absent. Other countries also faced the same capital crunches and cyclical business environment, and still invested. It was not that the Japanese, Koreans, and Italians were somehow more "risk-taking" than the English ... no, rather their unions had not yet taken hold post-war to smother innovation.
Unions always trade away the advancements of tomorrow for the security of the workers today. When one supports a union one should always keep in mind that you are putting down for your comfort today and mortgaging your children's tomorrow. This might not be an issue if your children don't follow your trade. But if they do, you've just screwed them over. The rest of the world doesn't stand still while your union blocks radical progress.
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 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?
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."After 100k, you get childcare benefit removed. This mean less money you pocket going from 99999 to 100k.
>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.
You touch on the core issue of the UK, but there's both a cultural and policy aspect.
1. As you say, an aging population has placed the entire country into a gridlock - the pensions system as it stands is ridiculous and unsustainable. Unfortunately, it is an almost immediate political suicide to even attempt to reform it. Young people are disillusioned and wield little monetary or political power. The old generation has all the cards, and are actively destroying their children's future for their own short term benefit. They have mortgaged their children's future, which they won't get to see, for the short period of time they still have remaining. 2. There's no investment culture in the UK. Literally everything and everyone is rent seeking. Want a retirement? Buy property and rent it out. Want a pension? Pension funds just buy gilts - government bonds. Very little money goes into productive assets. This creates a vicious cycle where money is simply siphoned away from the little productivity that remains to an ever growing number of rent seekers.
There's no easy way out of this. One generation will effectively have to give up their welfare, but nobody wants to do this (understandable). The UK cannot afford to be the welfare state it wants to be.
well to be fair UK lost much more important things than shipbuilding
shipbuilding is the least of they are gonna worry
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.
This seems, either naive or wishful thinking. The ‘normal means’ of transferring power and status as far as I recall from most history I’ve read usually involves some sort of massive war. Sometimes this ends well for the rising power, other times they wind up finding their fortunes being reversed. Even when things don’t wind up being so dire, it’s not very often you see complete forgone conclusions in international relations, especially between countries separated by a body of water.
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
Its not clear what you said
“ 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.”
This is very much "why does China, the largest country, not simply eat the others".
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.)
Here’s the thing though, if china keeps on alienating all of it’s export markets by variously undercutting them, monopolizing strategic resources and then embargoing them, stealing technology and dumping excess capacity from its industrial sector, it may find itself with no more export markets to sell to.
Human societies are, in general, fairly well attuned to collective action against a perceived collective threat, that’s what we evolved to do after all. And unlike the USSR, China has done a fairly bad job of building any soft power that it could use to modify public opinion.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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
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.
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.
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?
It's somewhat reasonable given the dire history of UK labour relations in the 1970s. As you say, it's now 2025 and the only people who can get away with that are maybe the train drivers. Everyone else has been casualized.
Come now, trying to talk about UK industry in the 70's without mentioning unions?
Except the post that you were replying to was not, was it? And you were talking in the present tense.
If you think unions have no possible value in 2025 you are either independently wealthy, retired on an excellent pension, or very misinformed. Right now everyone should be considering whether there is a union for them, because what is coming down the pipe is not good.
Nobody here is talking about unions in 2025 except you, the whole post is about the decline of British shipbuilding which happened in the second half of the 1900's, along with a lot of other industry.
Sorry, this is just untrue.
You were responding to a comment that was only talking about contemporary issues, so at least someone was talking about contemporary issues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873952
So I responded, quite logically, as if you were talking about unions in a contemporary context. Not least because you replied in the present tense to a comment about the present.
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.
> Too often modernizations fail because they look at the "on paper" process, which isn't what the workers are actually doing.
Also software installations fail because management decide what they want and go shopping for it, the users are not really in the loop about what they actually need, and management is an interchangeable class of people who think they know management but have often never done the job they are managing.
At the core of what you're saying about the "on paper" process is the fact that nobody does time-and-motion studies anymore.
Systems analysts barely exist in 2025, largely because interchangeable people in management get interchangeable "solutions providers" in, and they build the only flow that fits their existing tool.
A few years back I was hired to fix a bad web-based product for a niche-ish market (a niche within a standardised market) put together by rushed remote subcontractors who'd never talked to the client.
I was handed the spec and told I was to implement it. So I implemented it to a certain point, and then (because my mother had worked in that field and I knew what annoyed her) I thought: Hold on, a core flow of this implementation is awful tiresome CRUD busywork and they will hate it within hours. I already hate it and I'm only testing it.
So I argued to change the spec, suggested a better flow that better suited their needs (and allowed two use patterns — on-the-spot and at-the-end-of-the-day — which had different flow needs), and was told by the disconnected management: that looks good but we need to stick to our plan.
So sure was I that a bunch of hard-working good-hearted people would curse my name that I "prototyped" it to show everyone, and they loved it. Because it wasn't just better and faster, it was instinctive and fun. They had already understood that they were going to quickly hate the thing built for them, but this they wanted to use.
And then we put the prototype in production because it wasn't really a prototype at all: the job was so easy that the "prototype" was the solution. It was just something nobody had thought to offer because nobody listens.
Upshot: incredibly happy end users who gained back lots of time, and also experienced so much less frustration that a subsequent feature improvement could be less rushed because they were able to spend a little more time on a process they didn't hate as much.
I dread to think what this actively-not-listening development process will do to people when solutions providers just shoehorn AI in to solve anything they don't want to do a proper process for.
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.
Yes, he is, could be better, could be exposed to a competitor. Medium to longer term it's not a great approach.
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 understand what you're saying, and I agree, technology doesn't always make things better. In this particular example though I'm not talking about adding frivolous software, I'm making the point they don't want to invest in ANY computing technology. Inventory, logistic, order, people or timesheet management. The example of IM is more a case of removing the requirement to hand a runner a note and them literally go to the other side of a warehouse to hand that note over. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
The thing is, that runner learns the business over time and could one day replace another employee. This is why automating away entry level jobs is not always a good long-term decision. Whereas e.g. Slack is just Slack forever.
And 100% agree, AI - Generative in particular - is a load of snake oil bollocks. It's not going to help any of us really. Hence the evidence coming out that companies are failing to see any return on their investments.
Some was lost. Some was freely given; Thatcher was no fan of shipbuilders.
Meanwhile the UK did give us the web and the CPUs we all use.
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?
Well, how do you craft corporate rules to prevent companies from extracting value out of their labor without being abusive, under-compensating people, discriminating, valuing nepotism over competence, exposing employees to unreasonable risk, etc? Most people take pride in their work, care about what they do, want to see the company they work for succeed, want to see competence rewarded, hate having to repeatedly clean up other people’s mistakes and will respect a company that treats them well for doing so. The company has leverage and the union has leverage and they work together. If the union has all the leverage and the company has none and the people in charge of the union are greedy jerks, well then that’s a problem. If the workers have no leverage and the people in charge of the company are greedy jerks, that’s also a problem— but it’s a far more common problem because it’s much easier for companies to get leverage than workers.
Look at the case of the boring company having workers spraying caustic chemicals in enclosed spaces with no PPE and laboring in ankle deep water in heavy work boots which abrade skin even when it’s dry. If a company can’t afford to stay in business without treating their workers humanely then they can’t afford to stay in business. But we all know from the rather well known CEO that lack of capital isn’t the problem.
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.
This is an under-appreciated point: the UK manufacturing sector is highly successful, but only where it doesn't employ large armies of workers, and is instead either automated or very small volume/large margin.
News coverage of this is, as expected, completely dire.
> 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.
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, ...
"Laborers wanted their fair slice of the pie so the bosses moved all industries and investments to Asia."
"Why did the laborers do this?"
"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
Free trade is not a cold rational economic choice. It is a political choice. It is a choice to put more money into the hands of the capitalist class, by means of improving their investment returns at the expense of that country’s industrial capacity.
> 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.
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.
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The most most successful car companies in the world are from a country even less advantageous to auto manufacture, Japan. They had very little natural resources and about the only avdantage vs UK was a little bit bigger population.
Longbridge is not inherently a worse place to manufacture cars than Munich, South Carolina or even Detroit.
I didn't realize the UK was known for wool production. I know it as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the country that mined enough coal to cover the entire country to a depth of three inches.
Blaming it on unions is dumb (German car makers seem to do just fine), but if you were looking at the situation in the first half of the last century, it would be pretty reasonable to expect UK car manufacturing to be a big deal. And especially ship building. They had the world's largest navy for a long time, and they didn't do it by importing ships.
For steel you need iron ore and coal, which the UK has plenty of. It was heavily industrialized in the 19th century. It's not that different in terms of natural resources to Germany.
British cars could have remained competitive for a lot longer if labour relations had been like in Germany. Germany's organized labour is/was famously mild compared to the feral British unions that were run by open Marxists and did things like topple governments.
It sounds like your hypothesis is that if only the poor people knew their place, and remained serfs, then UK manufacturing would be the best in the World...
I'm sure you're insisting on working for below minimum wage with no holidays and no sick pay, just to show that unions are worthless.
Germany's economy is currently collapsing because they can't import cheap energy. I don't think unions matter much, except to democracy.
The british isle is also unlikely to become a steel production hub unless it both grows massively and reorganizes its labor around efficiency rather than profit.
That's true today but is a very recent thing. The trends I'm talking about were mostly in the 20th century when Germany had cheap energy.
Britain was a steel production hub once, making 40% of the world's output. But I agree it's unlikely to become one again. For one many of its coal mines were shut down and flooded or otherwise destroyed.
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.
China has "dark factories" - so little labor that they could turn the lights off. Absolutely no reason those couldn't be in US or UK if proper investments were made at the time.
the rust belt, and deindustrialization in general was a political choice. The free trade agreements that enabled it were enacted for a number of reasons, some well intentioned, but ultimately they were a choice to mortgage our industrial capacity now, in exchange for gdp growth back then.
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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.
>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.
Except that we don't have monopoly on that. Assembled in China, designed in California worked for a while because of the inertia of the previous times when the whole pyramid was located in the US. For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
Guess what - we moved the bottom layers of the industrial pyramid and we are acting surprised that the top layers are also organically happening there. We are probably somewhat ahead, but if we get wiped out of existence tomorrow the progress in China won't slow down.
> For a lot of stuff it mutated into designed in China, assembled in China.
What am saying is that this is not happening because shit got assembled in China but because of internal issues in the West. Bringing assembly back is going to make matters worse, not better; and I think this is where I (and most?) people disagree here.