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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

construction-physics.com

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Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#211

Post by pjc50 »

gambiting wrote: post #204
dijit wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation. I thought it was because my city (Coventry) was devastated after world-war-2 (the blitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz ), the collapse of the British car industry (which, primarily affected Coventry) and then the closing of the coal mines leading to lower income tax money to the council for roads and things.…

>>I always got the feeling as a child that I was growing up in the ruins of a once strong nation I live in the UK and not in London either, and it constantly feels like everything is just decaying and the country lives in the past not the present. Everything is just dilapidated, falling apart, or shut down. The streets are full of rubbish, dirty and local infrastructure doesn't get fixed up for months if someone dama…

Poor country through which a lot of wealth passes, or is held. But there's also a lot of very British defeatism. A sort of squashed spirit which is against the possibility that things might be better, because then they'd be different. And of course the easy blame on foreigners.

I do think there used to be more middle class public/civic pride, and you can see this in some places that have retained it and cleaned themselves up. I see the various "transition towns" (Totnes, Bristol etc) as one way forward: they have a vision of a future involving local people, not just a vision of the past.

> Our local library had to be closed due to lack of funding recently. A library. What kind of 3rd world behaviour is that?

Closing things down in order to avoid having to put up taxes is extremely first world behavior now.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#212

Post by pjc50 »

roenxi wrote: post #200
lm28469 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend

People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be. The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive mo…

Nuclear energy belongs in the "unaffordable industries which failed to adapt" category. They could have maybe eventually reconciled with the safety question and the weapons question, but getting undercut by renewables means that's the way forwards to green energy.

Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#213

Post by vidarh »

ben_w wrote: post #180
lm28469 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend

Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK. That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the p…

It feels like the British establishment is particularly good at one thing: Being pragmatic enough to stay in power.

That appears to take precedence over anything else. It may have "saved" the UK from revolutions or major clearouts of its governing structures and legal system, and results in a system that is delightlyfully quirky on the surface.

But it's also a way of governing that seems to lead to managing decline over fixing things because managing decline is less risky in the short term.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#214

Post by ben_w »

scott_w wrote: post #209
ben_w wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe as a whole didn't give up in the 1970s, but the 1970s was famously bad for the UK. That said, I think this was more a case of when the rot in the UK became visible rather than when it started; the British government hasn't been competent for a very long time, and still isn't. With the caveat that I'm not a historian and have only an amateur knowledge of the events, I'd say the problems set in even before the p…

If you think the British Empire was ever competent then I strongly recommend you listen to the episodes of the Empire podcast that cover the British Empire (there’s a lot of different episodes across the series). With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history. That said, I don’t think it’s u…

> With the exception of the Royal Navy, the British Empire was spectacularly incompetent. It’s a running joke that the British stumbled into being the largest empire in history.

Hm. Well, I can't say I know any better than that, I was rather assuming that becoming the biggest empire was itself due to something approximating competence.

Certainly, if one takes the view that all large organisations are mediocre, the British Empire is unambiguously an example of "large organisation".

Edit:

Just to check, the Empire podcast by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#215

Post by pjc50 »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #155
coldtea wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now. Sometimes the time to fix a thing in general (nevermind the "best time") has come and gone, and the rest is wishful thinking and platitudes like "the next best time is now".

The UK is actually doing something(ish) about it now. Innovate UK (the UK’s public innovation funding) recently had a bid out for maritime R&D but with a focus on clean tech: https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/opportunities/clean-mari... Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic are…

In my most cynical moments I think if the UK actually wants to build ships the best thing to do might be to close down the existing shipbuilding industry first, and start a newer more efficient one from scratch.

Per Ferguson Marine, do you want to prop up a dying industry or achieve usable ships? What's the actual priority?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#217

Post by pipes »

thorin wrote: post #138

Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.

I think a lot of it is because after world war 2 the labour government decided that a centralised planned economy and nationalisation of every business (and I do mean every, this was in labours manifesto until new labour in the 90s) would perform better. It didn't work, it destroyed industries.

This gives some idea of what happened: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUgYWRhbSBzbWl...

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#218

Post by scott_w »

ggm wrote: post #2

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…

> Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not.

So the simple truth is you can almost never "ignore the cost" because that cost must be borne somewhere. And there's always someone that's considered "national-strategic" by someone. Hell, I recall my dad being enraged that our "blue" passports are now manufactured in Poland under contract from a French company. What actually happened is De La Rue took the piss on their contract bid thinking they would just rinse the taxpayer.

Having the taxpayer there to bail out a failing shipyard blunts the incentive to modernise which, as we can see from the article, was barely there to begin with. Should the taxpayer sit there with effectively unlimited liability to build these ships? Should that come at the expense of, say, funding for the NHS? Housebuilding? Fixing our crumbling prison system? Modernising our water infrastructure?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#219

Post by jack_tripper »

gpderetta wrote: post #193
jack_tripper wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Submarine fleets will torpedo your blockade. No need to fire nukes.

My understanding is that the UK currently has 5 attack submarines. Is that enough to break a blockade? More are planned (the SSN-AUKUS), but it is probably still some time away.

That's around 100 torpedoes loaded in the water. Is that enough to break a blockade?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#220

Post by RobotToaster »

realityking wrote: post #175
noir_lord wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happened during the Falklands War. There are peacetime rules and war time rules, war time rules are best summarised as “government does what it wants and justifies it after the fact”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:... under “Ships taken from trade”.

I just clicked through to some of the listed ships and it appears they were all flying a British flag in 1982 before being requisitioned. It’s not at all clear to me a government would have that power about a foreign flagged vessel, even if the shipping line owning it might be British.

Maybe not legally, but most of the countries used as a flag of convenience are tiny, what could the Marshall islands do about it?
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