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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
"As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive."
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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
Jesus Christ. have you ever considered that a northern european island known for wool production is a shitty place to manufacture cars or to produce steel? In what universe would we be driving British cars if the UK had no unions? The main difference would be that brits would be suffering faster.
You've been huffing the media far too long, friend, time to take a break.
Edit: I'm certainly not arguing for american manufacturing. American cars are expensive and shit.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
Are you OK? You seem to have issues with when to capitalise letters. Understandable when English is a second language and you have a lot more forums to piss on.
"how could the UK ever compete with China" - What is the point? China isn't really that important. It's handy for cheap stuff but nothing else.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Who are you to decide these priorities for other people?
Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?
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.
See this video on the economics of shipbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo
Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
A fantastic long read on this issue from a Glaswegian perspective (2022): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-ste...
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.
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)
Good thing that Japanese and South Korean shipbuilding industries exist
"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 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
Meanwhile the UK did give us the web and the CPUs we all use.
Some was lost. Some was freely given; Thatcher was no fan of shipbuilders.
It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments:
> I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini).
I grew up in the UK and it felt like everyone of my parent's generation had stories like that. My father was in management and had to go toe-to-toe with a union that was on the verge of wiping out his industry (private sector TV), they were doing things like shutting down transmissions as part of demanding higher wages. In that specific case the unions failed as the TV companies were able to automate the transmission suites and then fired all the workers, this was in the 1980s I think when the legal environment was more conducive to that. Funny story: one of the fired workers moved to the US and ended up writing a popular series of thriller books that ended up being turned into a movie series, he became very rich in the process. So the union failing ended up being good for that guy in the end.
But in many industries they weren't able to beat the unions thanks to a series of very weak left wing governments in the 50s, 60s and 70s (even the Conservatives were weak on labour until Thatcher) that largely made opposing the unions illegal. So the industries just got wiped out one by one. Today the same problem exists but with Net Zero instead of unions, it makes electricity so expensive that industry becomes uncompetitive vs parts of the world where they don't care, and the political class is fine with this outcome. Decades and decades of governments that cheered on deindustrialization for left wing ideological reasons.
So whilst the shipping industry probably did have problems in management (just like the car/steel industry), ultimately having good management wouldn't have helped. What determined if an industry survived this period or not was whether the management was able to automate fast and completely enough to break union power.
The main reason the car industry couldn't hack it is because of quality issues. There was this joke sticker for the back of your Jaguar or Rolls: "The parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture".
I worked a lot on classic Mini's, Metros and Maxi's. The degree to which body work had been patched and bent to match it to the corresponding chassis was quite amazing. Rumor had it the Leyland factory had a guy with a very large hammer standing at the end of the line to 'adjust' the doors if they didn't close properly. I totally believe it. I've seen almost new subframes that were Swiss cheese from rust and/or with very bad welding.
That said, there are few cars that are more fun to drive than a souped up Classic Mini, and even fewer that would be as lethal in an accident.
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.
> 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).
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.
Jeopardy style, Who is Lee Child?
> The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result
Jesus Christ. have you ever considered that a northern european island known for wool production is a shitty place to manufacture cars or to produce steel? In what universe would we be driving British cars if the UK had no unions? The main difference would be that brits would be suffering faster.
You've been huffing the media far too long, friend, time to take a break.
Edit: I'm certainly not arguing for american manufacturing. American cars are expensive and shit.
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.
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.
Longbridge is not inherently a worse place to manufacture cars than Munich, South Carolina or even Detroit.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
Their USP was their empire, a source of free raw materials.
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.
holy cope
> it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
This is a virtual advantage, which is being eroded as we speak.
Thanks to the overuse of sanctions, many countries have already switched to bilateral currencies.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
"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.