Conor here: Reading the following in tandem with Craig Murray’s recent piece, The Beat of the War Drums, is an interesting exercise. What is one to make of these collections of wealthy elite in Europe who destroyed industry in their native countries, yet now order the band to play The Imperial March? A few possibilities come to mind:
- The war talk is simply a distraction as the vultures accelerate their looting. (Yes, it can also be an attempt at distraction for political purposes, but one that accompanies ongoing privatization and active efforts to make citizens’ living standards worse).
- They’re suffering from severe Covid cognitive dysfunction.
And it’s possible that at some point these two tracks merged into one. Now it’s just a waiting game to see how much longer until the train inevitably runs out of track.
By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future.
For forty years we were told that Britain didn’t need manufacturing — finance would make us rich. That experiment has failed. We import more than we export, our towns have been hollowed out, and our prosperity rests on hot money and property bubbles rather than productive capacity.
In this video, I explain why Britain’s industrial collapse was a political choice, how Thatcherism destroyed long-term investment, why Labour still worships foreign takeovers, and why rebuilding national capability now requires deliberate government action.
We need regional public investment banks, a tax system that rewards real production, not speculation, and a new industrial strategy that blends modern manufacturing with care, education and innovation. This is about well-being, security, and the future of our democracy.
I was asked recently, “Why does the UK no longer seem to make things?” And it was a great question because it goes right to the heart of what we mean by growth. Can a country grow without manufacturing, was the subtext of the question that I was asked. I think that’s fair because for 40 years we have been told that finance and services will make us rich, and the truth is that it has not worked.
We are still told by Rachel Reeves, for example, that the City of London represents the jewel in the crown of the UK economy, the driver of growth, the foundation of our wealth, the basis for our exports and prosperity for all.
We were told we could financially engineer and speculate whilst leaving others to do the manufacturing for us, but this is fantasy economics. It’s money elevated over making, and like it or not, you cannot live off money. I don’t recommend trying to eat it, not least because most of it’s purely electronic and I’m darn sure that eating some microchips won’t be good for you.
So the truth is that we are now a dependent economy as a consequence of this policy. Britain consumes more than it produces; this is a simple, straightforward statement of fact. We import more than we export. That’s how we know that this is the case. Prosperity is now dependent more on property bubbles and hot money and on tax haven satellites that sustain an illusion of wealth flowing into this country than it does on industrial and national capacity, all of which have now been hollowed out.
Why does this matter? It matters because manufacturing is not about nostalgia. It creates skills. It creates design expertise. It creates innovation. It rewards those who partake in it because they get a sense of satisfaction out of having made something. I know that: it’s why one of my hobbies involves literally making things from scratch, putting together something that works that didn’t previously exist.
And manufacturing also creates apprenticeships; apprenticeships in real skills that are sustainable, and they provide stable work. This then strengthens local economies through multiplier effects, and that has social and political consequences.
We are dependent on imports, and that leads to a sense of a lack of ownership of who and what we are. Industrial decline has followed, and it has left hollowed-out towns right across the UK. That loss might not be captured in GDP, but it’s visible on the streets of this country. And in turn, that has fed into the growth of the far right because there is despair in abandoned communities, and I understand that.
So we have to make choices. The government chose finance over industry in the 1980s. I remember Thatcher’s arrival. I’m old enough to do so. I voted for the first time in a general election in 1979, and we got Thatcher, and she set out to dismantle British industry. Unemployment went through the roof; it ran to millions because she destroyed factory after factory after factory, with the deliberate destruction of industry and the inflation of the value of the pound to suit the needs and greed of the wealthy, at cost to the real people of this country. Her mantra of let the market decide meant let the City decide and speculation replaced long-term investment.
Share buybacks replaced research, and bonuses replaced wages for working people. Finance dominated. We set banks to rule over the allocation of land within society, and that’s how they thought they could make their money, and they ceased to fund innovation. Good ideas and talent were wasted. Manufacturers lacked patient long-term finance, and Labour now promotes foreign takeovers as investment, calling it foreign direct investment. But let’s be clear, it’s all about selling the family silver. Selling the future creates economic insecurity and not prosperity, as Labour would have it.
So, we need to rebuild, but that requires deliberate action. Just as the destruction of manufacturing was a deliberate choice by the government, so must the rebuilding of manufacturing capacity in this country be the consequence of deliberate government choice. We need public investment banks and not just little piffling ones, which is what we tend to end up with at present. I’m not condemning the development of such a bank in Scotland, or the new idea that there might be one in Manchester, and I’m not condemning the government schemes, but they are tiny in proportion to need.
We need real hardcore public investment banks of the sort that Germany has had for decades, and which have provided the basis for its industrial investment strategy.
These must be regional. That’s important; there must be one for Scotland, there must be one for Wales. There are such structures in place, as well as in Northern Ireland, but they must also be regional within England itself, because there must be local decision-making on how these funds are directed into communities that need them.
And the tax system must be aligned with that goal. Tax systems must reward real investment and not extraction. So the idea that we have at present, which means that every business that, whatever it does, gets tax relief on all its so-called investments, is absurd. What we want instead is that there is a very strong incentive to invest in real productive capacity, and those who are investing in financial services, and in financial speculation, or gambling, or the destruction of our planet, should begin to see their capital investment programs phased back, because we want a deliberate industrial policy that promotes what is useful and not what is harmful. In this way, the state must become a partner to real industry and not a passive observer.
But, and I’m going to raise a very big but here because I think it’s a good point to raise as well, and that is that not all growth is produced by making more goods, and that’s critical to understand. There has to be a partnership. Care, teaching, healing, and research also create real value. These expand our collective capacity to live well just as much as making things does. Neoliberalism might have called them costs and not investments, but the reality is the opposite. These things are about creating well-being, and the stress is on the word well. We do need them because without them, we cannot live well.
And there are genuine foundations of growth within our public sector already. Hospitals and universities are productive assets. They create knowledge and long-term capability. Real growth builds human and social capital, and that’s what these places are about. They also support innovation within ecological limits, and that’s fundamental to our future prosperity.
So right now, what must the state do? It needs to invest, it needs to coordinate, and it needs to plan.
We must rebuild energy and manufacturing capacity.
We must invest in care and education to support innovation.
We must invest in a green transition so that we can live within our planetary boundaries.
And we must reform finance so that it serves society and we do not serve it.
This means that we do not need to restore nostalgia for the old industrial Britain. The smoky chimneys, and steam engines, and all those things might be great for heritage railways and for that industry, but they aren’t the basis on which we are going forward. That old style industry represents a myth in itself as much as a myth of the fact that finance could ever replace it. What we want is value that creates sustainable well-being, and that requires a new industrial strategy.
A new industrial strategy based upon combining modern skills, and care and innovation, with the capacity to make. And that is vital.
We’ve got those skills.
We’ve got that creativity.
I only have to look around me to realise that they exist. What we lack is the political imagination to put them together and the willingness of the government to invest in this process.
Manufacturing must return as part of a balanced economy. We need to rebuild social foundations on which all production depends, and growth must serve society, and not the other way round.
We could still have a new industrial age, but it’s one that will respect limits, put people at its epicentre and which will realise that meeting needs and not wants is the priority, and as a consequence, we will live better. Manufacturing has a core part to play in our future. Let’s not pretend otherwise, and we’ve forgotten it for too long, and we must invest again.
What do you think? Do you think we should be investing in manufacturing? Do you think we need an industrial strategy? Do you think we need to target tax reliefs on real manufacturing and not on financial engineering? Do you believe people want to work in this way? Let us know.
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The relative decline of manufacturing in the UK predates Thatcher.
“When Thatcher came into power in 1979, the UK’s manufacturing industry had already begun to decline as a percentage of the country’s GDP, from 20.57% in 1970 to 17.62% in 1979, according to figures from the ONS. Although this figure continued to drop, it did so at a considerably slower rate during Thatcher’s time in office, recording a figure of 15.18% when she left office in 1990.”
I suggest deindustrialisation, measured by % of GDP, was faster under Blair / Brown than Thatcher
yes. UK manufacturing grew fat and happy via the colonial system. Once the Common Market/EU gathered steam, their fate was determined.
Thatcherism was more a symptom of decline, not the cause
This is what I came to say. I don’t take issue with Richard’s proposed solutions, but like yourself I view the decline of UK industrial capacity over a longer timeframe — back as you point out to the end of the period of “imperial preference” and the captured markets of the colonies in the British Empire’s imperial periphery (of which the UK was metropole). Ever since Suez (and arguably even before that) it’s been one form or other of mismanaged decline all the way down, including the thrashing about of the Thatcher era.
Presumably those who benefited from that imperial system were unable to understand what would be necessary to rationalize UK plant for domestic consumption and instead just engaged in wholesale closure and regional abandonment in favour of quicker profits in finance.
The only real solution, of course, is some kind of socialism — but in the current neoliberal dispensation that is heresy and must not be spoken aloud, much less given serious analytical consideration. So, various versions of barbarism are apparently all that are on offer for the foreseeable future …
Per your second sentence, Richard is really stating a need not a solution. “Manufacturing must return as part of a balanced economy. We need to rebuild social foundations on which all production depends, and growth must serve society, and not the other way round.”
There aren’t the technical people, or the material resources (steel, aluminium), or the (modern) manufacturing plant in the UK.
A solution needs a pathway to get those. After 40 years moving in the opposite direction (no more free tertiary education, steel mills, car industry), it simply won’t happen.
Then the US must force its Imperial Subjects to partner with China and Russia in a Global Manufacturing Renaissance.
We had economic difficulties resulting from wartime borrowing, to a degree the construction of the welfare state, sterling was a reserve currency which was probably the UK’s greatest policy restraint, but one important fact which we tend to ignore was the existence of the provincial stock exchanges which favoured investment in local industry, unlike London which dealt in government debt – and subsequently corporate debt – and gilt edged shares issued by large businesses which favoured markets in which they exercised monopolistic power through branding, size or what have you.
In 1960 we had 21 provincial markets which merged over the decade until we had 11 very active regional stock exchanges. By dint of government pressure, broker operating in more than one exchange and corresponding brokers, the exchanges were merged with the London exchange to form the London Stock Exchange which predictably opened up provincial industrial companies, now with the cachet of a London quote, to asset stripping by the likes of Slater-Walker, et al. That is the real starting point of the UK’s industrial decline given that breaking up industrial companies and flogging off the different bits in dustbin trusts to unsophisticated first time investors generated a greater cashflow and was a lot more profitable than making widgets, or whatever.
A few years ago I reviewed the broad economic history of Glasgow and the Clyde, which had an extraordinary industrial output and engineering prowess in the 19c and early 20c. For people like me who grew up with Jimmy Reid fighting Ted Heath for shipyards, I had the idea the de-industrialization was a phenomenon of that era. Then I learned that was far too narrow a view. Glasgow/Clyde industry, and the huge workforce involved, was hit very hard by the Great Depression. That capacity got some work again with war spending and after that there were strategic reasons to keep some of the yards going for a while. But after the Great Depression there was never really a return of the former private sector capital. Later in the 70s and 80s there was some success with light industry thanks to public infrastructure investments in roads and industry/business parks on the periphery of the city.
I don’t know to what extent other post-industrial cities in the UK had a similar story. In any case, Glasgow’s deindustrialization really happened far earlier. The public sector picked up some slack in the ww2 and reconstruction periods and this perhaps makes it look like it happened later. But even that decline was before Thatcher.
The critical thing Thatcher accomplished was to shift the ideology of the UK (and perhaps beyond) from belief that an economy needs ultimately to rest on creating wealth to belief that it isn’t necessary. She popularized the political theory to accompany the shift from productive to financial capitalism that was already in full swing in the 70s.
Here’s a superb and evocative photo of what Glasgow could do https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSA05183 Be sure to click: View larger image.
Washington Naval Treaty doubtlessly did in a lot of shipyards in great powers that specialized in warships….
As early as the 1960s, the asset strippers and corporate raiders like Slater Walker had arrived.
As early as the turn of the 20th Century, the UK was responsible for about 14 percent of the world’s manufacturing production, however, that was down from about a third only some 40 years earlier. The financial sector was maintaining dominance.
Thatcher also boasted that Blair was her greatest achievement,
And some people wondered why Brits sang ‘Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead’ as her coffin was driven past them.
They continued the plan, as well as Mr Brown selling britains gold off at a cut price rate. Yes or no?
An interesting case is shipbuilding, which can’t be laid at Thatcher’s feet:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-uk-lost-its-shipbuilding
Financial chicanery can be lucrative, at least until Dubai outdoes you on the money-laundering front, but is not a substitute for a healthy diversified economy of a major nation like the UK. The odd thing is, because of its political stability, British governance is not all that different from the one which led to its apogee in the 19th Century, yet state capacity nowadays is abysmal. I suppose much of the same could be said of the US.
I agree with the criticisms of modern Britain but I think the causes are deeper and the potential solutions are much less clear too.
I happen to have spent much of my career in and around manufacturing both as an employee and as a consultant. My very first full time job post university in 1989 was in a factory at Spondon, Derbys located not too far from Richard. We produced yarn and other products from wood pulp and vinegar. Was actually a thriving and highly profitable business even in 1991 post Thatcher. We also exported to China.
There was a whole broader textiles supply chain too, much of which my company owned. By year 2000 it was all gone. The yarn factory closed to a large degree because of energy costs and it was also unable to carry on using its own coal fired power station. Passing the site on the train is always a melancholy experience.
The clothing businesses closed in the late 90s too mainly because large U.K. retailers resourced to China and other low cost markets. I happened to have worked for the major consulting firm in the late 90s that helped the biggest retailer of the time to do that, which I am not exactly proud of by the way. However, if the retailer was to survive they had very little choice. At the same time, I worked personally with a large aero business that again had no real choice other than to resource components manufacture away from expensive local plants to “low cost” sources. Thatcher was long gone by this time.
Blaming Thatcher and Neo liberalism is easy to do (and they clearly have some culpability) but the full reasons for the decline of British manufacturing are far deeper.
Given this, I would be interested to understand which manufacturing sectors Richard has in mind for investment. As I am sure he realises, modern factories employ very few workers. My factory in 1970 had employed over 10,000 workers but by 1989 it was down to 1200, albeit producing more yarn. Today’s equivalent would be even smaller by a multiple. So modern manufacturing does not create anything like the employment that it used to. I also know from my own work in the procurement field that the actual value add from manufacturing (dependent on supply chain) can be as little as 10% of final retail price. Profits these days do not flow to local communities via the traditional wages / component purchase multiplier either but are financialized / globalized.
So I am not convinced that manufacturing gives a silver bullet. My suspicion is that the realities of modern U.K. politics are that an industrial strategy would end up as a boondoggle. Likely favoured sectors would be defence and enabling certain “entrepreneurs” peddling “AI” to create data centres and so forth that employ hardly anyone and bring no net income to local communities but create more pressure on the energy supply. Sad but unfortunately very likely.
As an aside, I understand the argument that the ability to “make” can have knock on benefits with respect to innovation and design which goes beyond the pure manufacturing value add. It’s a true but only up to a point and from personal experience is often overplayed and highly variable by supply chain.
I would also push back on universities. Up to a point they are highly productive. But the question must be asked of whether we have over expanded this sector based on individual incentives for credentials., rather than the overall public good. When I see graduates replacing older retirees who left school at 15 in roles such as secretaries then the question has to be asked and the statement that “universities are productive assets” not just accepted at face value.
We do need solutions to our current financialized state but I think the analysis needs to go far further and the current U.K. state apparatus lacks the capability to do what is being asked.
The first step is solid capital controls. If public funds are to be used the playing field must be controlled for the common good, both coming and going.
Stephen: “Given this, I would be interested to understand which manufacturing sectors Richard has in mind for investment.”
I would argue that in Anglo-America, where so much productive capacity has been squandered, it may be that all aspects of manufacturing and all aspects of agriculture have to be renewed. This may call for such old industries to be revived like steel mills (modernized, specialized), textiles (why can’t Anglo-America make its own socks? bedsheets? towels?). All of the skilled trades are in decline in the US of A, except maybe artisanal brewers. What happened to tool and die makers? plumbers? electricians? Likewise, food: Has the rise of fastfood chains meant that most people in Anglo-America are reliant on eating out of the trough that is McDo’s? Isn’t there room for new ideas and improvement?
And trains. Both the U.K. and U.S. of A. have thoroughly screwed up systems of transport and are very far behind on rolling stock.
Unfortunately artisanal brewing in the US is also in decline. Last week the Rogue Brewery in Oregon (a massive craft brewery in Newport) shut down, sacking dozens of employees and owing almost a million in unpaid tax and rent.
However, ICE wants to open one of its pop-up prisons in Newport, and is advertising for guards.
“What happened to tool and die makers? plumbers? electricians? Likewise, food: Has the rise of fastfood chains meant that most people in Anglo-America are reliant on eating out of the trough that is McDo’s?”
A quick walk through my neighborhood — Elmhurst, Queens, NYC — would give you the answer: very active and dynamic immigrant skilled labor and small businesses owners.
There is also a huge cultural problem with the pervasive view of the unworthiness of labour in mechanical and industrial production.
Where in any Western society today would you encounter a narrative that would suggest that working in manufacturing is preferable to academia?
I know there is the day celebrating manufacturing of machines in Russia but that is an outlier on the continent.
Be it in real life or in fictional tropes – in 99 out of 100 cases parents will always tell their children to aspire to good grades in school so they may attend university afterwards NOT manufacturing and – my main point – “enjoy a better life and fate” than their parents (who supposedly were in manufacturing.)
Since WWII the pride of labour has completely vanished while during most of history it enjoyed much respect (of course within ideological limits.)
The paradigm of “labour” must therefore first change completely, it must regain its once positive, powerful image and “flavour”.
Until we will reach a point as to reverse the current beliefs you will not change anything on the ground.
Or the state enforces this and determines who is working in what job but that cannot be a viable path – I am convinced it was one reason for the dissolution of the Soviet system.
Which means nothing less than reorganize and rethink labour and work in societies at large – eventually creating a system where also demeaning and filthy work is allocated among all parts of society equally, and where also one person is not forced to follow one single path for an entire lifespan.
This of course would necessarily erase “the job market” which only covers up the inequality in influence and available means and apparently in natural ways but in fact by fraud assigns ugly work to individuals of certain social strata.
Which eventually brings us to limits too considering that expertise in some professions can demand a lifetime of doing one specific thing only. Also such professions as surgery or controlling a nuclear power plant cannot just be filled in by anyone. So there a huge hurdles.
But unless we change the entire ideological set-up individuals will not go into manufacturing voluntarily.
Of course you can e.g. pay much higher wages. But that too would be no substitute for a socialist community with very little or very limited private property and no concentrated capital. One where the state provides for everything to an extent that happiness is realistically possible.
As far as I remember Parecon by Michael Albert et al. was attempting to solve this but never gained real traction within the left. Also I think Noam Chomsky drew some positive experience from his time in Kibbutzim before 1948, of the kind that were cooperatives with the native populations and all work was shared equally.
Thank you and well said, Stephen. I agree in particular about the UK state apparatus.
As the G20 mobilised over 2009, China and, to a lesser extent Russia and Türkiye, sent young officials to learn from UK stakeholders what had gone wrong. I met them at the banking trade body where I worked. We often went off site on our own, so that I could talk out of turn.
The Chinese learnt well and continue to do so, e.g. inviting Mervyn King to lecture in China after retirement from the Bank of England. King talked out of turn, too, and advised his hosts not to lose control of monetary policy and to minimise the scale of assets in potential adversary locations. This is in part a reply to a question asked by Revenant a few months ago.
@ Readers: Please read Richard’s post on his site as the reader comments are interesting. 😉.
Thank you, Colonel. I should add that it is unfair of me to single out the state apparatus. The business community (albeit with some exceptions) is not so much better. So much of our modern “business” is either in the form of rent seeking oligopolies or else focused on the politics that are needed to sell to the public sector. Alternatively, the money is made through financial engineering, Competing in international markets to satisfy customer needs is not something that so many of our businesses do these days.
Désolé, mon Colonel, but what exactly did I ask because I don’t remember the question! The answer seems fascinating, if I could only pigeonhole it. :-)
I concur that it wasn’t Thatcher who did this, although she may very well have accelerated the process. I am reminded of the British motorcycle industry, which once was very big, but failed when the Japanese got their bikes going.
The British Government did a big report on it, and if I recall it well enough, the conclusion was that Britain wasn’t competitive for a whole range of reasons. There was no one single fix.
Strangely, I am in investor in British manufacturing (a tiny startup, and this does not make me an expert) and I see the problems all the time. It doesn’t help that the Chinese are just better at most of the supply needs, and we can’t blame the Chinese for that.
But it sure doesn’t help at all when the Inland Revenue won’t pay the R&D subsidies that they promise – two years after filing, they are still faffing around and have now decided to outsource the programme to specialist preparers. So our capital gets eaten up when we are financing the UK gov, and now having to file again and pay the outsourced specialists as well.
The UK leads the world in one thing – bureaucracy.
I think everything you say is absolutely right and honestly brings things full-circle to Marx. The system may have evolved new features like you mention since the late 19th century (extreme automation, credentialism, consumerism). But the fundamental drivers are the same and the flip-side to your questions.
A cutting-edge factory requires relatively little labor, but why must that labor be split between a few people working 60 hour weeks and hundreds outside the gates scrambling to survive? The same power structure that “disciplines” workers with unemployment also drives over-specialization (and therefore credentialism), partly out of laziness & partly divide et impera.
The value-added stats you point out also reflect that. Manufacturing & raw materials only capture a small part of the profits in many products today. But the flip-side is why do middle-men and follow-on services get to inflate the final cost of a product several times over, beyond even what distribution, retail, customer support, etc. reasonably demand.
In the end, the old theory of commodity exchange (and how it plays with people’s minds) explains a lot. We implicitly agree as a society that merchants at every step in the chain should be able to ask whatever they want for a sale, without any collective reasoning or insight into where that commodity came from. And that’s largely because, as a type, those same merchants are running the show.
So I guess the upshot of what I’m saying is simply that some kind of socialism is still the only way out of the downward spiral.
“So I guess the upshot of what I’m saying is simply that some kind of socialism is still the only way out of the downward spiral.”
Correct. But the UK, like the rest of the Anglosphere, will try literally anything else first. Sadly there’s going to have to be a lot more failure before they become desperate enough to go there.
NotThePilot: but why must that labor be split between a few people working 60 hour weeks and hundreds outside the gates scrambling to survive? The same power structure that “disciplines” workers with unemployment also drives over-specialization (and therefore credentialism), partly out of laziness & partly divide et impera.
[1] Yes, of course.
And by the same reasoning we ought to have a world full of jet airline pilots who’ve never gotten ‘credentialized’ with pilot’s training and never gotten a pilot’s license, who have never ‘over-specialized’ in piloting, and who only work a few hours a week. Brilliant.
[2] In the real world of 2025, I’ve actually visited a ‘dark factory.’ This particular case* employed five (5) people who each made something like $500,000 yearly.
That’s because these people had to have hybrid expertise, firstly, in robotics engineering — that is, understand industrial robots, their programming, calibration, and integration with production lines — and, secondly, AI/machine learning — that is, understand AI-driven optimization and catch AI systems when they screw up and then fix the problems — and, thirdly, industrial automation & control systems — which is a whole field in itself, requiring knowledge of things like PLCs (programmable logic controllers), SCADA systems, and IoT sensor networks.
And these people also had to carry out predictive maintenance & reliability engineering — that is, they had to interpret the sensor data to anticipate failures and schedule interventions without disrupting 24/7 operation.
[3] – In the real world of 2025, the bottleneck isn’t the technology but finding the talent to manage these complex, fully automated facilities. That’s another reason the Chinese are winning this, because that talent is rare in the US population, where the majority have reading skills at the level of 10-12 year olds compared to most other developed countries.
*The particular case I encountered was the Moderna RNA vaccine factory, where the particular hybrid expertise required included biopharma and so was particularly specific and thus an outlier. There aren’t many fully automated factories yet outside China, but so you know I’m not pulling this out of my fundament here are the baselines for US automation salaries and as you’ll see executive-level types in automation-heavy factories can get $200,000–$400,000 —
https://www.automation.com/article/2024-automation-professional-salary-survey
–
So this may sound shocking and I doubt most on NC would go as far, but per your 1st point, I would say (with caveats) yes. Licensed pilots crash planes, licensed surgeons butcher patients, I’m getting to witness the wreckage left by professional engineers (for the tradesmen to mitigate) first-hand in my life right now, etc.
It’s a core ideological feature of our society that we refuse to see credentials for what they are. They’re not inherently invalid, but every credential represents a substitution. Every credential is a token ultimately awarded by social / institutional logic in lieu of a direct evaluation of performance.
More to your example, I’m definitely not saying every joe schmoe should be allowed to fly a plane. Quite the opposite, I’m saying as many people willing & capable of learning to fly should be able to gradually work up to it by taking shifts / seasons in that industry. That they primarily work as a barista or only got an associates in nursing before shouldn’t matter. And if 4 pilots want to work on a seasonal or 2 year rotation, instead of burning out 1 pilot for 8 years straight, I don’t see technical reasons it couldn’t work, only that modern employers would rather commit economic seppuku.
Which gets back to the original point. Our obsession with credentials is directly linked to the fact our society would rather obscure everyone’s real performance record than embrace something like the old Soviet labor book (or ironically the badges aka “microcredentials” from the more progressive side of Silicon Valley).
And that also gets to your third point. We’ve entirely muddled up words like “talent”, “skills”, “education”, “knowledge”, and “competency”. To rectify terms, people bring those things independently in all combinations IRL, and they’re cultivated in different ways. It’s only through the lens of credentials that a mediocrity with a long list of failures can be more qualified than genuine talent with a history of success.
What is the “old Soviet labor book” that you reference? Im really interested in the credentialism topic. I wonder whether the Soviet system counterbalanced credentialism in some way – my recollection is (from personal memories and accidental reading) that it didn’t do that very much.
Very thankful for your thoughtful comments.
Pretty much this thing:
From Wikipedia: Employment record book
And for the record, I don’t think such a thing would magically solve the problems of finding work and appropriate workers. It can even generate new ones. People will always try to turn any system to their advantage, and I’m sure a lot of people would dislike the privacy implications.
But I do think if there is any “fix” for fairly & efficiently matching work to workers, we have to get past continually relying on appearances and indirections. And I think letting employees own their own work history, validated in detail as it unfolds, like an artist’s portfolio, would be a step in the right direction.
And another small thing that you or I can do right now is rectify terms like I mentioned. They’re all related, but the various words we use to describe someone as capable or qualified aren’t the same. In fact, they’re different enough to imply very different things about individuals and labor policy.
NotThePilot: And that also gets to your third point. We’ve entirely muddled up words like “talent”, “skills”, “education”, “knowledge”, and “competency”.
You’re the one prattling on about ‘credentials’ — they’re meaningless, as I said above. You’re the one muddling up words like “talent”, “skills”, “education”, “knowledge”, and “competency.”
All that’s irrelevant. The reality is that in 2025 — not some far-future SF scenario like, say, Iain Banks’s Culture where AGI has magically arrived, bringing luxury automated communism — the actually-existing, totally automated factories we have require individuals running them who have a combined set of actual STEM-based competencies — nothing whatever to do with credentials, which is your irrelevant obsession — that are in some cases far rarer than jet airline pilots.
Seriously. Do you really imagine corporations would choose to pay $350-500 thousand to such people in some cases if they had alternatives?>
NotThePilot: Our obsession with credentials is directly linked to the fact our society would rather obscure everyone’s real performance record than embrace something like the old Soviet labor book
Chernobyl.
There’s a case of your ‘old Soviet labor book’ competence in real-world action, as opposed to whatever fantasy you’re drawing on. Because the real USSR was obsessed with credentials and, yes, obscured everyone’s real performance record. But their credentialism were based on Party standing and conforming.
One Russian scientist, who’d been a department head in the Soviet-era bioweapons program, once told me that another department head got fired and, essentially, had his career destroyed simply because people found out he practiced yoga at home in his spare time and that was ‘weird’ It was an extremely conformist society in many ways.
The problem with credentialism that NotThePilot is raising might be exactly the opposite of what he’s thinking: how come, with all the college grads we have, the technically proficient people are so lacking?
It’s not quite that we are lacking the “top notch” people–we produce no fewer of them than comparable countries. But that’s not what we mean here, are they, but a rung of two below them–the very good, highly competent people. We ARE distressingly short on turning them out. But we have plenty of highly credentialed people who are lacking in competence. When credentials cease to be the marker of competence, the labor markets become inefficient.
Actually, it’s different from both your & Michaelmas’ point, and much more basic.
The problem is that our employers, who we give all the decision-making authority in job matching, can’t find the necessary competencies (or mistake proxies for them). They’re like the drunk looking for their keys under the streetlight, and when they can’t find people, just assume the people must not exist. The breakdown in relevant training is directly related to that too.
For another example, consider the hiring studies Google did a while back. They found that the best measures of future job performance were, surprise, surprise, technical evaluations that hewed closely to the actual job tasks. Then a basic structured interview to ferret out personality problems. And yet, even Google doesn’t just do that because of institutional inertia.
And on the Soviet example, you’re absolutely right, Michaelmas, that all the centralization & paperwork became part of the decay. But we’ve been spending at least a whole generation disorganizing the labor market and “freeing” businesses to do what they want… and we’ve wound up in the same place. I don’t see how you fix things without taking some steps back in the direction of social, rationalized centralization.
I really didn’t mean to start an argument, and I know this is a topic where my views are pretty far out there. I’ve just seen throughout my life that our society wastes a lot of talent & acquired skills, and at the same time, the workers we often do invest in definitely aren’t what their employers seem to think they are.
It isn’t that complicated in my opinion. First you have to realise that somehow making all your industries competitive or even necessarily equal to global industries is extremely difficult to nigh on impossible. There’s what hundreds all competing to be the best and to get the most sales. No its never going to work.
You have to realise that some industries are just vital. It doesn’t matter how they function it just matters that they function work and in bad times its something you can somewhat rely on. Government has to spend its might and money to fully and keep them afloat if necessary. As well as giving these vital industries money directly it can give business tax incentives for using these industries. Whether its steel or farming, manufacturing etc.
I think as time goes on we are going to find out which nations have the resilence to survive the coming chaos and it really isn’t going to the be UK. Its going to be nations that have the ability to feed its populations on its own and create the equipment like tractors and basic tools and even weapons, and electricity etc, that will survive for the longest at least.
This is the way. Stephen is still looking at the issue in a profit/loss framework (hardly surprising in the era of neoliberal ascendancy, and I am not blaming him personally) when it’s a question rather of capacity — it’s more of Keynes’ “whatever we can do we can afford” with the emphasis on the DOING and sustaining the capacity to “do.”
Abjuring industrial capacity because of insufficient profits or “jawbs” is a recipe for civilizational backwardness and technological suicide.
Agree with both of you and mostly with Stephen, too. We do need to get away from the profit/loss framework, so making the necessary structural adjustments is going to have to incorporate the concept of ‘enough’.
We should make things locally, or at least regionally. Efficiency is overrated and redundancy to a point is a great boon. It’s why engineers designs jets with four engines, not just one and not fifty either. When enough has been produced, turn the factory off until more is needed and allow people to enjoy the fruits of their labor. We can’t have factories churning out product 24/7 whether anyone needs it or not, and using the profits to finance armies to crack open even more reluctant markets. That is insanity.
Universities need to change for sure, and the credentialism needs to go, but I would argue that a higher education is a public good in itself, especially a broad and general one that incorporates some trade skills into the academics, rather than separating the two as we do now. So the university teaches everyone to think and to do, and graduates leave with a major in history and a minor in arc welding for example.
I use history as an example due to the truism that those who don’t learn it are destined to repeat it. If we want to make lasting beneficial changes, we need those making them to understand how we got here in the first place. I just finished reading Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution which discusses the consequences of the British industrial and French political revolutions from 1789- 1848. He makes a good argument that the combination of the two which produced a bourgeoisie with the means to make massive profits that led us to the situation we are in today with neoliberal capitalism dominant, and liberté, égalité and fraternité left by the wayside. Marx wouldn’t have been necessary without the dark, satanic mills. And while I haven’t read a ton of Marx directly, those who have have claimed that even Marx didn’t much dispute the notion that going forward, humanity would be toiling in factories and churning out goods going forward – he just thought they should be communally owned.
“Given this, I would be interested to understand which manufacturing sectors Richard has in mind for investment.”
Here is one: pharmaceuticals.
Europe hosts quite a number of very profitable, world-class pharma companies of all sizes, many with a prestigious track record. Despite all this, the whole subcontinent has been wracked by constant shortages of medecines and medical products already for years. The pitiful “market-oriented”, non-interventionist measures to address the problem have been essentially ineffective.
In fact, many of the basic pharma products come from India, and most active ingredients come from China.
If only to ensure the functioning of the national health care systems — and that means saving lives — European countries, including the UK, could start re-manufacturing all medicines considered essential, if necessary by expanding the role of their military pharmacies if private pharma corporations find the endeavour not profitable enough for them. At least part of those new outlays for “defence” against Russia will thus be used productively.
Here in SC, USA we have a BMW car plant that employs 10,000 workers. We also have empty textile sites (sometimes turned into condos) in a region that once was a fabric making mecca. If one may be indulged some speculation, here’s suggesting that manufacturing thrives in areas that are poor and trying to become wealthy as was true of the US South until recent years and all those crowded Asian countries that have risen to dominate the field. As seen with BMW you still need lots of workers willing to spend their days in a noisy factory doing physical labor and running machinery. And there also needs to be a national culture that values upward mobility in order to motivate people to do this.
Of course the way things are going in the US the poverty may return but the aspirational side is being destroyed by our all too indifferent upper class. They are the ones who don’t care to make things. Perhaps that is also true of Britain.
“I also know from my own work in the procurement field that the actual value added from manufacturing (dependent on supply chain) can be as little as 10% of the final retail price. Profits these days do not flow to local communities via the traditional wages/component purchase multiplier either, but are financialized/globalized. So I am not convinced that manufacturing gives a silver bullet. My suspicion is that the realities of modern U.K. politics are that an industrial strategy would end up as a boondoggle.”
From my own travels abroad, I’ve noticed that Global Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) platforms are an existential threat to Western “middleman” economies, as they have been to developing economies. The post-industrial Western prosperity model is built on high-margin, brand-centric layers, encompassing marketing, wholesale, and retail (the “Smiley Curve”). The hyper-efficient DTC model connects foreign factories directly to consumers and dismantles this structure. What has long been justified as “value-added” is often simply “value-extracted” through control over distribution and branding.
As financial security becomes more precarious for wage earners, the willingness to pay a premium for branded identity diminishes. Preferences start shifting to a transparent marketplace of functional commodities away from an opaque one of perceived value. The recent anti-consumer protectionist policies are not just about tariffs or jobs, but an effort to preserve this economic paradigm.
Without our own robust manufacturing capabilities, the West can’t counter the pricing and efficiency of hyper-DTC platforms. This leaves the entire ecosystem of the brands, distributors, and retailers that constitute the “middleman” economy with no leverage, without the threat of reshoring. Unable to compete on cost, we are entirely dependent on the global supply chains that are now being used to disrupt and “disentangle” us. Did we really think we could ride this hypercompetitive beast forever with nostalgic brand taxes? The laws of physics don’t remember “Established in 1687”.
Thank you for the insights. We saw after Covid in some remoter areas, the smaller restaurants not shoveling money into corporate profit and expansion were able to get on their feet and provide better value, while the chain ones got expensive, and had to restrict hours and close lobbies, because no one wanted to work there.
But, as long as giant chains are still given preferential prices for wholesale goods, they are still stomping all over even the most efficient small business, and more and more give up the ghost daily. Changing that one aspect of law interpretation would level the playing field, but apparently the Supreme Court likes the status quo and reaffirmed it this year.
I think there is also an inherent lazynes in the species, and when it gets to the top of the tree, that laziness meyastisizes very fast and swindlers and psychos get the upper hand while peddling snake oil and ponzi schemes.
And the UK had several bouts of such laziness in the past. It really doesn’t like to compete and prefers tricks and feints.
After the defeat of Napoleon (which was an European entreprise, not only British), there was a collapse in prowess. The Crimean War showed how full of hubris the Brits were and it took a woman to ship shape them back into place. Plus some governmental reform that started advancing meritocracy.
Was the same with WWI, with the Brits having only experienced revolts and wars in India, South Africa, Sudan, etc., dealing with very sub-par enemies. Same with WWII.
Now the decadence is even greater and the competition is even fiercer while the ruling elites are even more incompetent. The face of Sir Kir Starmer, vacuous, with no personality and no visible thought on his face, with slightly close together eyes that show that there is light but that nobody is home is the best personification one can think of of UK right now.
And there is more to fall, much more. Add some serious climate change in the next 50 years and you have an overpopulated island that cannot possibly feed itself, fish stocks down, oil and gas down, education down, technology down, structurally divided (by class and race) and one gets a bleak picture.
Kouros; The face of Sir Kir Starmer, vacuous, with no personality and no visible thought on his face, with slightly close together eyes that show …that nobody is home is the best personification one can think of of UK right now.
Ouch.
Thanks for this essay. These questions and ideas also regard the U S of A.
I will also add agriculture. I made a detailed comment yesterday about cheese and cows, but a bigger question for Anglo-America is why was the smaller farm declared economically unviable, why are so many crackpot management ideas infesting the U.S. food system, why is food distribution particularly badly managed in Anglo-America, why was agriculture turned into a way of concentrating wealth among the distribution companies?
Living as I do in the Undisclosed Region where SlowFood was founded, I am reminded very often by spokespeople that SlowFood isn’t a gastronomic society. (Yes, it has that side.) SlowFood is about good, clean, fair distribution of food. The implication is that the producers have to be kept on the land, and that many species of foodstuffs have to be preserved. I will also note that the Italian food-distribution system is much more elaborated and much more complicated — I see delivery vans for plenty of local producers zipping around the city constantly, all day long.
Also, I will add that Anglo-America has a weird culture of work. Yes, people are supposed to work, work, work, but there is a certain contempt for the dignity of labor. Why would you want a newfangled factory when the goal is to cash out and buy a condo in Florida? Thatcher, Reagan, the Bushes, and the Clintons are very much part of that culture of grift and mismanagement.
I’ve read a lot of commentary blaming Nixon’s USDA secretary Earl Butz, e.g.:
https://grist.org/article/the-butz-stops-here/
The perfect mixture of Roman and Scandinavian plunderers. The rest of Europe has not managed to distill this trait as much, some not having any such inclinations.
And then there is the matter that the only jobs in the modern factory are for robots.
Then the question isn’t whether or not to have factories and robots, but rather who shall own them and claim their output?
The question is who repairs the machines, who transports materials to the factories, and who distributes the products to other factories or warehouses, and who provides the necessary services (accounting, maintenance, design, etc.), and the R&D is not by robots, and it has its own needs. And those workers need services.
And long term, decoupling R&D and design from the manufacturing process is clearly less efficient than in-country, where the design engineers can talk to the machine programmers and operators about how to include manufacturing best practices into the design.
The same can be said of agriculture, which also is rapidly (in China) automating.
But it will never compete with the profit (ROI) from flipping a house unless gov’t evens the playing field.
There you go. Tax systems can be tailored to incentivise anything we want to encourage. Unfortunately our ‘leaders’ are incompetent grifters who are clueless that this is desirable, much less how to accomplish it.
Economists who aren’t living in the trickle-down past should be leading the way with coherent policies and recommendations on exactly how to de-financialize and revitalize our economies, before we reach Thunderdome conditions. Right now we just have thousands of authors telling us what is wrong with the current situation.
I heartedly recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, for everyone. It’s a long read but it does specifically answer the question:
I think you are onto something important here.
Throw in British worker-management relations. Of course both sides will point the blame at each other…but a plague on both their houses.
The epitome: 1970’s British Leyland, their quality problems (much like Detroit) opened the door for UK car buyers to pivot to Japanese imports.
‘I remember Thatcher’s arrival. I’m old enough to do so. I voted for the first time in a general election in 1979, and we got Thatcher, and she set out to dismantle British industry. Unemployment went through the roof; it ran to millions because she destroyed factory after factory after factory, with the deliberate destruction of industry and the inflation of the value of the pound to suit the needs and greed of the wealthy, at cost to the real people of this country.’
I made several trips to the UK in the early 80s and it was depressing to see the decline. In the large towns there were more closed shops than working shops in the main streets which really stood out. On the TV news at the time there would be, say, a story about the closing of a factory in Sheffield with the loss of several hundred jobs and nearly every night there would be a similar story of another factory closing. It was like a steady drip drip and the number of unemployed climbed into the millions.
Thank you, Rev.
I remember these factory shut downs and demolitions on the evening news. I was at junior school at the time and recall pupils arriving from south Wales, Strathclyde, northern England and Northern Ireland as the Thatcher wrecking ball swung. I also remember one leaving for Australia with his parents.
This sort of thing no longer makes the news. The City, Whitehall, including the Foreign Office, and local government are being decimated. It’s not reported.
The only good thing that came out of Thatcher’s regime was the music — the best of which featuring opposition to her and her program of wrecking.
I was in the UK frequently from 1982 to 1985 and noticed the same thing…
I’d travel to the continent a lot on those trips, and you’d be on a German train, and the doors had push button electric doors that opened and closed in a jiffy, while in Merry Olde you had to manually open a window on a door to open it by using the outside handle when you were inside the carriage to exit, you really wondered who won WW2?
One time I was in London and fished out a 20 Pound note, and had an older man chastise me, and say ‘never show that much money in public!’.
Yesterday I read a very disturbing article on the BBC (of all places) that it now is common for the foodbanks in Britain to have people show up who have not eaten in days and ERs treating people showing signs of malnutrition.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd67q034e7no
How far Britain has fallen – awaiting a “Let Them Eat Cake” moment to awaken the vox populus?
Amen to that Louis – British Leyland quality problems. As a young guy I owned a 1970 Spitfire and later a 1974 TR6. I called the Spitfire my F-14 as it required multiple hours of wrenching just for short stints of trouble free driving. Adjusting the needle on the TR6’s Stromberg carburetor to keep the engine from stalling or bogging at the low end was a constant challenge. But when they were running well both were a hoot!
After my Leyland experience I ended up with a Mazda 626 and years of trouble free motoring.
Agree entirely. I had a Spitfire, and when running well it was great! Took a lot of work though.
I got the second Mazda MX-5 (Miata in the US back then) imported into the UK, and it had all the fun (more in fact) than the Spitfire, and it just worked. I put over a quarter of a million miles on that with zero problems. The best car I’ve ever driven.
The TR5 and the Spitfire were made by Triumph not British Leyland. I was an apprentice panel beater in a body shop in Ireland in the 1960s. We found repairing Triumph crashes harder as they always had much worse damage than British Leyland or Ford cars to repair.
I bought a 68 Spit in two pieces, took it entirely apart, then repaired and reassembled. Replacing the Stromberg with a Weber was a choice I never regretted! It was such fun to drive until I was rear-ended on 93 north of Boston on a rainy day. The big American vehicle didn’t notice. I was glad to be alive. I described it as “engineered to fail,” but cherish the memories.
Whoops. 40+ years gone…. SUs in the Mk 3, not Stromberg, but still glad I went for the Weber. My buddy had a later Spit with the latter and made the same choice.
I once read a long article on restoring 1960’s and 1970’s British classic cars, with digressions as to the development and travails of the British car industry, and at one point it noted that the secret to a successful restoration was Lucas parts, specifically ripping them all out and replacing them with anything else!
Thank you for this essay. The thoughts below may appear incoherent and poorly organized, so forgive me in advance. I agree with many of the points Murphy makes, but as others above have pointed out, much of the making of things has been automated, controlled by machines in turn controlled by machines. I see this as an inevitable outcome of all computing, which has the overriding goal of doing more, of producing more with less — less meaning less human work. Is this a bad thing? No, not necessarily: meaningful, rewarding, socially valuable work takes many forms. This website is a prime example.
When I was growing up, the vision of having machine labor replace human labor was touted as liberating: humans would need to toil less, particularly in physically dangerous work, could relax more, devote time to creative activities, etc. But that vision requires that the fundamental relationship between labor and capital change: labor — meaning ordinary people — must collectively own the machines, otherwise the freedom from toil will be replaced with the freedom to be poor.
Even more fundamental: the control and use of energy and resources must change, as it is obvious our current path is unsustainable even in the short term. This is particularly true in the US, as the NC community points out very frequently. Our current scale of production — industrialized agriculture and all of its externalities — is a good example. All of this must change.
None of this happens without a revolution, even a slow one. It need not and should not be violent, but ordinary people need to — and can — compel this change. Corporations and political bodies are still controlled by and composed of people, but the number of people in control is miniscule compared to the larger population.
“2. They’re suffering from severe Covid cognitive dysfunction.”
I think they’re suffering from coke, meth, and money.
Great missing historical oversight in this article.A major reason for our British decline was the Japanese ‘ world class manufacturing model’ Kanban,JIT,Zero changeover time etc.This decimated our native industries as well as those in the USA as it turned over our many of our preconceptions.e.g associating huge quantities of WIP with an organisations good health.
One early example of this, in 1977 we bought our first CNC machine.Tbe Japanese were able to guarantee to fly over from Paris to the UK within 24 hrs while Herbert and Ward – a world famous Birmingham M/C tool company only 60 miles up the road took 2 weeks to send us an engineer!.
A specialist in Japanese manufacturing techniques I undertook a prestigious MBA in 1994 hoping to learn the latest Japanese manufacturing techniques in for Ops Management part.I ended up giving (paid) lectures in them,as it was palpably obvious the segment was way out of date.Go figure.Just a couple of small examples from over a wonderful 30 years making things from around 1970.The last onein 1970 approximately 10m were employed in making things when I left in 2000 around 2 m were left
Apologies should have been posted re UK manufacting decline
My view of Thatcher (and I lived and worked through her reign) is as low as anybody’s, but the problem starts further back. Britain never had a revolution, which meant that the upper classes, cleverer than their equivalents in France for example, were able to absorb their middle-class rivals, many of whom came from manufacturing, by marriage and co-optation. Critically, however, they managed to retain the ability to dictate what was and was not a desirable social status. Traditionally, all aristocracies had been based on land ownership and lived on unearned income from rents. This was more socially prestigious by far than to work for a living: to be “in trade.” Thus, as finance became a more and more important part of the British economy, it became a source of socially prestigious unearned income — almost as prestigious as land and property ownership. Indeed, the line between the two was effectively blurred, and one way to become wealthy and successful which was much admired in the 90s was speculative buying and selling of houses, putting together a property portfolio where you could live comfortably from rents. Nothing is, or was, more prestigious in England than living without having to work. It’s possible to see the whole of British history for the last two hundred years as a struggle between the productive and the extractive sides of the economy, or if you prefer between Making Things and Making Money. The bad guys have definitively won, though it has to be said that British manufacturing was in such a state by the 1970s that it didn’t take much to kill it off. (“There’s nothing wrong with the management of British industry” went the joke at the time “that a firing squad couldn’t cure.”) But then again, the social status of manufacturing was such that this was probably inevitable.
There are small signs of hope, and I mean small. Makers of up-market but affordable clothing continue to prosper in France and even expand their workshops, and recent years have seen new factories opening making clothes and specialist equipment. Of course you pay more, but then as they say, buy a pair of socks made in China and they’ll be useless at the end of the year. Buy a pair of socks made in France and they’ll cost three times as much but last five times as long. But then manufacturing always had more status here.
There are small signs of hope, and I mean small. Makers of up-market but affordable clothing continue to prosper in France and even expand their workshops, and recent years have seen new factories opening making clothes and specialist equipment.
France has the CMA (system of trade schools) and Parcoursup (system of apprenticeships that are the second half of the trade school programs) that probably have a lot to do with why they’ve maintained the skills and can build out workshops and functional businesses. I heard a year or two ago that Spain was looking to create an equivalent to the CMA there especially for building trades; I think every country should consider the same. There are parts of the US where there are decent vocational schools that are kind of analogous to the French system but they depend on having an existing industrial base and partnerships with the local companies. For example there is a strong one in south-central Oklahoma where there are a number of Boeing and other aerospace and defense supplier factories.
Thank you.
I remember being delighted to discover that in France they have an Ecole Nationale Superieure de Patisserie, along with other Grandes Ecoles, like the famous (now defunct?) Ecole Nationale d’Administration which produced so many top figures in France.
Of course they have a Grande Ecole for pastry! How else do you get croissants of uniformly excellent quality all over France?
A lot of the time I really admire the French. Savoir vivre I believe it is called.
That’s the Captain Vimes boot theory:
https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots-theory-of-socio-economic-unfairness/
England, France and so many other countries saw millions die in wars last century. No mustering out to return to the factory or elsewhere.
When large cohorts vanish, those vacuums are hard to fill, even hard to acknowledge and recognize in communities, lives and memories.
Aurelien: Britain never had a revolution
What alternate timeline’s history of England was this in?
[1] An intelligent person could certainly make the argument Perry Anderson makes, that the English Revolution (1639-60) happened prematurely compared to continental revolutions and so, because capitalism was already advancing in England, the bourgeoisie there never needed to overthrow the aristocracy outright.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/i161/articles/perry-anderson-the-figures-of-descent
https://archive.ph/hh4lR
The Wiki is a good summation of Anderson’s argument —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nairn-Anderson_thesis
[2] Perry Anderson aside, however, if there was no English revolution, then you know more than (among many, many others) both John Milton and all Marxist historians from Marx himself and Engels onwards (e.g. the likes of E.P. Thompson), who all have called the period from 1639 to 1660 — a period which saw the beheading of the English king, the establishment of Parliament’s constitutional supremacy, and the appearance across the country of socialist groups like the Diggers and Levellers — the English Revolution.
I don’t think you do know more than John Milton, or Marx and Engels, or E.P. Thompson.
Certainly, if you want to make a contrarian claim like ‘Britain never had a revolution’, you need to make it clear to your audience that you do understand enough to know it is a contrarian claim and you know what the historians’ arguments are, and nevertheless can justify your claim.
Because they might otherwise decide that you’re pontificating without really thinking your claim through or knowing that what you claiming is the case is indeed so, mightn’t they?
I think I can see where Aurelien is co.ing from: the “revolutions” in English history were when the aristocracy replaced the king while keeping much of the status quo, not large scale transformatioms of society. But that begs the question as to how common real revolutions were, though: the American Revolution, in this sense, was not unlime the English. Tocqueville argued that the French Revolution simply supercharged the ongoing attempt by the French state from.at least Philippe Auguste onward, whether a monarchy, a republic, or an empire, to centralize, and do gorth.
At least the British beheaded their king.
And outside Northern America, nobody talks about an “American Revolution”, but refers to those events as the “American War of Independence”.
Yes, I assumed that that’s how people would read the comment. Britain had a Civil War, a military dictatorship, a Restoration etc and there was a fashion in my youth (by over-emphasising the role of some small militant groups) to call all this a Revolution. (This was the sixties remember.) The problem is that nothing much changed, and I think historians these days are much more reluctant to think in terms of Revolutions, and much more of continuity. Certainly, the aristocracy retained its dominance, and much more than that, as I’ve suggested, it retained the right to say what was and was not a socially prestigious way of having money.
Share your skepticism.
Which begs the question what would have to be “revolutionized” to render a genuine revolution?
If I look at UK, the resources are in essence still with the century-old elites not least due to the fact that it´s an island which was not invaded for a millennium now.
However if I look at Germany the concentration of power and money hasn´t change much either. The same families, clans, circles are in charge since 1870s.
Even though we had huge disruptions throughout the past 150 years unlike English society.
Matters that did change in the FRG and which I would consider truly revolutionizing daily life to an extent were mainly of the social kind, i.e. minority rights.
But those were ongoing struggles since the 1950s until they were eventually put into law by the 1990s.
The constitution of the nationstate as such were not touched by this however. For that kind of upheaval we have to look elsewhere. South America, USSR, Asia, Africa?
If you want to get what is only a slightly exaggerated view of industrial relations in post-war Britain you only need to watch two films: Carry On At Your Convenience and I’m Alright, Jack.
Indeed.
This reads like someone running for Parliament. Our future is in our hands. All we have to do is organize intelligently, invest wisely and work hard. Vote for me.
Deindustrialization started almost immediately after the war in the UK, later in Germany and other European countries as many of them received the lion’s share of US money and goods post war.
In the Sixties the pressure was obvious. Indian textile mills were gutting the North and China was taking bike manufacturing et al (presumably from Birmingham too). It wasn’t always about service and quality. The quality isn’t always comparable. The UK simply couldn’t match the price.
The government populated by people who knew nothing about industry sank everything into the financialization of the South East. They still run for office just like this article is written (sans the references to socialism etc).
My first non kid’s bike was a three speed Raleigh made in England. I even bought a prestigious Brooks leather saddle made in UK but could never get it properly broken in.
During WW2 the UK manufactured thousands of aircraft. Their Rolls Royce engines were even licensed and taken up by the Americans in planes like the Mustang.
The UK also played a not insignificant part in that ultimate technical achievement, the atomic bomb. What indeed happened to you guys?
Whatever it was it also happened to us and our 70s cars were often not much more reliable than those Triumph Spitfires. Things wear out. Cultures too.
During WW2 the UK manufactured thousands of aircraft.
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It is so heart-warming to read about different types of policy suggestions for creating economic prosperity and social stability.
It is far beyond time for the left side of the political spectrum to begin to overcome a seemingly habitual tendency to think that wishing and simply waiting for social collapse is a genuine solution to anything other than more nihilism and despair.
Maybe. if this keeps up, a populist Left could actually become an important player in finding a constructive way out of the present economic, political and cultural chaos.
Are there any developed nations where manufacturing hasn’t declined? As countries become wealthier, business owners tend to move production facilities to developing countries, where labor is cheaper. Additionally, workers prefer working in comfortable offices to working in unpleasant factories. This shift is an economic inevitability, not a failure of neoliberal policies.
Switzerland
Great reading and agree with most given how applicable to the USA where, as in Britain the same ancient enemies rear their heads – I think pointing to Thatcherism as the emination or start point of the mess is not wholey justified but it certainly can be considered the point in a four cycle engine where the spark ignites the compressed gases and comes at a timing that politicians have for centuries tuned.
Intake/compression/ignition/exhaust…..
Sorry to drag up the thinking of this four cycle engine around one century ago 100 yrs. – although one needs to translate the old terminology with the new. wealth is not money and is on the industrial capital side by the making of tangible things via human labor whereas, stock market activities and preditory capital with its asset stripping, asset inflation/ficticious capital, monopoly, buybacks and rentier behaviours with debt leveraging etal that produce non -tangible and kinda has no linkage to the production-and-consumption economy, is not wealth and is speculative.
I guess a derivative of Allen Watts – ‘Money is a commodity, invented to help people by facilitating transactions. It is not wealth in itself. Wealth is natural resources, water, food, land, education, skill, spirit, ingenuity, art.’
“The great sore spot in our modern commercial life is found on the speculative side. Under present laws, which foster and encourage speculation, business life is largely a gamble, and to “get something for nothing” is too often considered the keynote to “success”. The great fortunes of today are nearly all speculative fortunes; and the ambitious young man just starting out in life thinks far less of producing or rendering service than he does of “putting it over” on the other fellow. This may seem a broad statement to some: but thirty years of business life in the heart of American commercial activity convinces me that it is absolutely true.
If, however, the speculative incentive in modern commercial life were eliminated, and no man could become rich or successful unless he gave “value received” and rendered service for service, then indeed a profound change would have been brought in our whole commercial system, and it would be a change which no honest man would regret.- John Moody, Wall Street Publisher, and President of Moody’s Investors’ Service. Dated 1924
“In spite of the ingenious methods devised by statesmen and financiers to get more revenue from large fortunes, and regardless of whether the maximum sur tax remains at 25% or is raised or lowered, it is still true that it would be better to stop the speculative incomes at the source, rather than attempt to recover them after they have passed into the hands of profiteers.
If a man earns his income by producing wealth nothing should be done to hamper him. For has he not given employment to labor, and has he not produced goods for our consumption? To cripple or burden such a man means that he is necessarily forced to employ fewer men, and to make less goods, which tends to decrease wages, unemployment, and increased cost of living.
If, however, a man’s income is not made in producing wealth and employing labor, but is due to speculation, the case is altogether different. The speculator as a speculator, whether his holdings be mineral lands, forests, power sites, agricultural lands, or city lots, employs no labor and produces no wealth. He adds nothing to the riches of the country, but merely takes toll from those who do employ labor and produce wealth.
If part of the speculator’s income – no matter how large a part – be taken in taxation, it will not decrease employment or lessen the production of wealth. Whereas, if the producer’s income be taxed it will tend to limit employment and stop the production of wealth.
Our lawmakers will do well, therefore, to pay less attention to the rate on incomes, and more to the source from whence they are drawn .”
Written around 1925 and found in -Tax Facts published in the interest of sound economics and American Ideals-
And the following also -Tax Facts published in the interest of sound economics and American Ideals-
“Laborers knowing that science and invention have increased enormously the power of labor, cannot understand why they do not receive more of the increased product, and accuse capital of withholding it. The employer, finding it increasingly difficult to make both ends meet, accuses labor of shirking. Thus suspicion is aroused, distrust follows, and soon both are angry and struggling for mastery.
It is not the man who gives employment to labor that does harm. The mischief comes from the man who does not give employment. Every factory, every store, every building, every bit of wealth in any shape requires labor in its creation. The more wealth created the more labor employed, the higher wages and lower prices.
But while some men employ labor and produce wealth, others speculate in lands and resources required for production, and without employing labor or producing wealth they secure a large part of the wealth others produce. What they get without producing, labor and capital produce without getting. That is why labor and capital quarrel. But the quarrel should not be between labor and capital, but between the non-producing speculator on the one hand and labor and capital on the other.
Co-operation between employer and employee will lead to more friendly relations and a better understanding, and will hasten the day when they will see that their interests are mutual. As long as they stand apart and permit the non-producing, non-employing exploiter to make each think the other is his enemy, the speculator will prey upon both.
Co-operating friends, when they fully realize the source of their troubles will find at hand a simple and effective cure: The removal of taxes from industry, and the taxing of privilege and monopoly. Remove the heavy burdens of government from those who employ labor and produce wealth, and lay them upon those who enrich themselves without employing labor or producing wealth.”
Query: As normal, sane human beings, where should we lay the heavier taxes, on industry or speculation?.
Great comment. I just happen to live in a place where all my neighbors are lawyers. They are paid huge numbers. They don’t really go to court or do research. They are partners. The junior associates do that. These huge numbers along with speculative market profits go into GDP. Politicians claim GDP is very high in the US. One reason might be how we define it. Tax policy could make a big difference but tax policy is determined by the donor class and lawyer/legislators.
This is why so much mischief originates from the lost (intentionally buried?) distinction between earned and unearned income originally outlined by the classical economists. It renders invisible the important distinction between productive economic activity and economic rents, leading to tax systems which likewise make no such distinction.
Richard Murphy is wading into territory that isn’t really amenable to accounting logic. He is, in effect, debating the purpose of life. His argument that “making things” is inherently socially restorative is understandable — manufacturing fosters skill, pride, and rootedness — but it is only marginally better than the hyper-consumption model that replaced it. The deeper problem is our inner compulsion to make, shape, and accumulate. That drive is precisely what underlies today’s ecological breakdown. Making more — even “good” things — cannot be separated from the sustainability crisis we have already entered.
Murphy also overlooks what Steve Keen has shown so clearly: the economy is a three-body dynamic system, inherently chaotic, far from equilibrium, and not easily steerable by industrial policy or public investment banks. The idea that we can simply “rebuild” energy and manufacturing capacity misunderstands the physical limits of the moment. Climate heating will reach 2°C within the next two decades, regardless of our preferences. Re-industrialization on any traditional scale is fundamentally inconsistent with the material and energy realities of a planet already in overshoot.
Vanessa Andreotti’s concept of hospicing modernity is useful here. Some things — indeed many things — have to die before new forms can emerge. The challenge is not to resurrect a lost industrial age or even to retrofit it with green adjectives. The challenge is to imagine futures that are not anchored in production, extraction, or growth as their organising principles.
Murphy’s analysis is coherent within its frame, but the frame itself remains tethered to the past. What is required now is not nostalgia for what we used to make, but imagination and trust in forms of life that have not yet taken shape.
Emotive but nonsense.
The consequence of following Murphy’s advice is reduced standards of living in UK for all. The less affluent will notice this more in terms of goods and services they can no longer afford. My large extended family from parents back were heavy industrial workers (inc mining) on one side and rural labourers on the other. Many arguments could be made for them being ‘happier’ but for a variety of reasons but they were not better off (stories of hardship are real and bleak).
Murphy’s vision is a form of fantastical progressive (in the vibe rather than actual sense) populism that deserves to be bracketed with the like of Green Party or its reactionary mirror image in Reform. What Trump, Vance and MAGA represents is not dissimilar and in many respects more realistic in perspective…although entirely ruined in application such that the US is actively weakening and ceding its position globally and ensuring its ‘one recession from revolution’ (I say that half serious and half dramatically but tbh I’m not sure which side to bias to).
Thatcherism was self harm in many ways but its myopic and pure political bias to view it at as the pivotal point of self harm in British modern history. Murphy reveals his blinkered political bias in doing this. The reality is that ‘Thatcherism’ is as much the child of ‘Callaghanism’ (and his Chancellor Healey) as any supposed right wing conspiratorial think tanks as they manfully and struggled to correct the havoc of Wilson’s incoherence AND the failed industrial and financial tinkering of all UK govts since end of WW2 when UK emerged industrially dominant (after US) as Europe and Japan had been destroyed and we rejoined our decline curve with gusto as we urinated away temporary advantage with complacency and hubris relative to the dynamic struggle to survive and revive elsewhere. The US helped this somewhat with policies that disadvantaged UK and ensured we were compliant (…it was not our ‘special’ friend).
The reality is that UK manufacturing has had a long decline since its Victorian apex. Back then we were a sort of hybrid of US and China in terms of global capability and dominance. And since then others have been catching up and taking us over. The reality is that once a manufacturing capability in an area becomes established it can be copied and done cheaper in lower labour cost places. This is a long inexorable process and reality that all developed countries face. Murphy can only have his new old industrial economy if he’s willing to introduce capital controls and a sort of partial autarky (revival of the Bennite dream!). Its a possible path we could decide to choose…but what does Murphy have to say about being able to afford the essential resources that such a self reliant economy needs? It must be significantly competitive in many areas to be able to afford the raw inputs we can’t source domestically. If its not then it eats itself as ineffective industrial production means we cannot export at a price that sustains our imports. Look to places like old USSR or past iterations of LatAm populist protectionist policies in Brazil and Argentina.
Murphy moralises that his love for tinkering can be writ large and turned into a new economic miracle. Tosh! His supporters may say look at Germany. It is not a good role model. Germany is aggressively mercantilist. The Euro has likely sustained this beyond what would have normally been possible. Germany locked in a low relative currency and labour price thro the Euro and has hollowed out production in other countries, notably Italy. But Eastern Europe has been steadily undercutting that and then China has rapidly leaped ahead. Germany is now living a version of post WW2 British decline. Maybe it will do a better job but it is at a risky crossroads. Murphy wants to take us back to what has worked out for them!
A real industrial policy for UK starts at retaining and reinforcing areas we are globally competitive and that is a number of places. Obviously, finance and professional services is key here. Also tertiary education and associated research. And then there are many areas of very high end manufacturing that are not huge in isolation but are well placed globally. This manufacturing is often a hybrid of research, advanced technology, services and production and it will often be absorbed by big global players to some extent as ‘advances’ become normalised and put into more scale production environment. This wont make for loads of jobs across society and often some of this is not really recognised as ‘industrial production’ in national accounting as its niche and specialist, but its essential to our competitive future and ignorant industrial (and tax) policy that tramples this is destructive.
So by all means target areas where heavy industrial production is a national security interest (steel, shipbuilding, military, energy, etc) but no New Jerusalem will be built on that. It will be a cost and subsidised by other areas. However more ‘artisanal’ small scale domestic manufacturing mainly for the domestic market is possible, additive and desirable. A policy to encourage that starts with reduced property costs (commercial and residential), investment incentives (inc tax breaks) and yes regional investment banks/institutions that can support and profit from positive local economic circulation.
Your mojo out
Your comment is quite the exercise in projection.
First, the plural of anecdote is not data. I am highly confident that I have vastly better anecdata that you regarding manufacturing jobs back in day and more recently. My grandfather was literally one of the last journeyman trained before World War I. That experience enabled him later to run a machine shop and teach manufacturing at night at Pratt Institute. Most of the rest of my father’s side was “rural laborers” as in farmers and commericial fishermen for generations. My uncle gave up being a public school teacher to lobster, and was much happier despite wrecking his knees on his boat. He would not have retraded that choice.
I grew up in manufacturing towns in the US (6 across different moves). My father was a superviser and later mill manager. These small town were all dominated by manufacturing. The kids I grew up (mainly blue collar mill workers) all had parents who had bought a house, owned a car, had a stay-at-home-wife, and were even typically able to invest in leisure, either owning a small cabin or a boat.
My middle brother worked his entire carrer in a paper mill. He accumulated a higher net worth than either Harvard Business School educated moi or my University of Virginia honors program grad youngest brother by having uninterreupted employment at a good wage, with a pension, relentlesslty taking every overtime opportunity (often at double and even triple rates) and living cheaply. And he supported a stay at home wife. He retired at 62 while my other brother and I are still working.
So your image of manufacturing having been nasty is a “dark Satanic mill” stereotype from the 19th century and not a 20th century image. You seem to be lumping in coal mining, which was very nasty and physically destructive work. But that is NOT what Murphy is talkng about and you straw man him by trying to work that ito your mix.
Now it is completely fair to say that mondern manufacuting is not like that. It is even cleaner and employs comparatively few people. So it can’t be a big driver of middle and lower class incomes the way it once was.
You are ALSO misleading in depicting direct factory labor as a big driver of manufacturing costs. For autos, it’s only ~3% of wholesale prices. As we have repeatedly described, offshoring and outsourcing regularly did not pencil out as a cost saver, even before adjusting for the risk of having a more complex supply chain that the lead manufacturer controlled less than before (and where they lost know how too). But companies announcing outsourcing/offshoring programs got a stock price boost. And offshoring and outsourcing, properly understood, were transfers from factory workers, who suffered job losses, to middle and upper managers, who had more important-seeming roles due to the increased coordiantion required
As for Callaghanism, he like Jimmy Carter flaied about in trying to combat the 1970s stagfation, and Carter was a proto-neoliberal as Callaghan was in moving away from trying to support living standards as the driver of prosperity. But to try to depict Murphy as wrong in depicting Thatcher as the driving force of the monetarism and financialization is bogus. Even the BBC disagrees.
While you offer a long-form critique of Germany, you completely omit the big driver of its big leg down in manufacturing, which is cutting itself off from cheap Russian energy.
And your solution>? A real industrial policy for UK starts at retaining and reinforcing areas we are globally competitive and that is a number of places. Obviously, finance and professional services is key here.” Seriously? When the UK damaged its primacy in its time zone with Brexit? And is joined at the hip with the US and so losing ground bigly with the much faster growing Global South? Look at how it harmed its position in insuring cargoes with its attempt to sanction Russia-bound vessels by refusing to insure them. So Russia and other countries stepped in. Calling these carriers a “shadow fleet” is name-calling to cover an own goal.
So please taking your sneering Dunning Kruger display elsewhere. Readers here know better.
It seems that some economists in the UK and US hold a peculiar notion: they view manufacturing as a social activity intertwined with white supremacy and patriarchy, which should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Maybe Thomas Jefferson was more right than was understood regarding “yeoman farmers?”
I ask only partly tongue-in-cheek….
Both the UK and Germany possess coal mines and nuclear power technologies, with the UK additionally having North Sea oil fields. Could anyone explain why these two nations have the highest industrial electricity prices among major economies worldwide?