31–40 of 531 posts
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.
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 shipbuild…
"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?
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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 thing…
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.
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.
On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
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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 com…
> 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.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
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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 fac…
Quality issues are inevitable if the unions see their role as preventing anyone from getting fired.
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.
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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.
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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 thing…
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.
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 in…
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.