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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

#321

Post by kelipso »

scott_w wrote: post #224
rusk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia aren’t going to use nukes on their own doorstep. That’s a a NATO problem. It’s like openly knifing somebody in public repeatedly while holding the would be hero’s at bay with a gun. Yes this is an actual thing that happened in the UK about 10 years ago.

Um... Russia's doctrine during the Cold War was to turn Poland into a nuclear wasteland to stop Nato advancing through it. At the time, Poland was a part of the USSR. What Russia considers "a buffer zone" is really "inferior peoples we can atomise without having to open a new conflict with a foreign power." To be clear, I use the term "inferior peoples" as seen from the Russian point of view.

Poland was part of the Warsaw Pact but it was never in the USSR.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#322

Post by shevy-java »

Somehow the UK is really in a downhill trend. For decades. BREXIT kind of accelerated that; people such as Nigel Farage won't follow on their promise. There won't be noteworthy economic growth for the common man.

The naval situation is even worse, because the UK totally depends on the USA now for its own nuclear arsenal. The UK has basically stopped being independent. Changing this will be hard and I don't think anyone in the UK wants to do that. There is no way for the UK to compete against South Korea's production; Canada will buy more equipment from South Korea. UK has never been in the race for competition (only Germany has). The UK kind of went into decline ever since Thatcher ruled, with a (too) few years in between that were not terrible.

BREXIT accelerated this but isn't the root cause - the root cause has to do with structural problems: https://www.ftadviser.com/uk/2025/7/21/the-uk-is-losing-weal...

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#323

Post by potato3732842 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #114
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…

I just don’t know that it’s feasible. As the article mentions, the U.K. shipbuilding industry was dependent on cheap, skilled labour. It doesn’t touch upon just how cheap . My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitu…

>My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50.

So basically the same situation as the prior generations of peasants toiling away to pay their taxes to the lord.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#324

Post by Tade0 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #306
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #303

Not a single mention of the Thatcher government in the 1970s, that sold off public-owed industries like British Coal and British Steel, and then set about acquiring and breaking up the shipyards themselves for scrap. All of it was worth more smashed up and sold for scrap, for the little quick "fix" that the Money Junkies in the Conservative government wanted. Unemployment and poverty rose steadily except for the bank…

Well after 45 years isn’t that just reflecting what the median voter actually cares about (or doesn’t care about)? If voters were genuinely willing to expend their political capital, time, attention, energy, etc., to a significant degree on this issue, year and year for 45 years… there’s no amount of party intrigues that could have blocked it.

Don't underestimate the power of divide and conquer.

Over here we had miners, farmers, steelmill and shipyard workers protesting due to similar reasons and for the majority the takeaway wasn't that those industries were in danger, but that the protesters demanded too much, because that's what people with influence said.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#325

Post by kelipso »

varjag wrote: post #260
gambiting wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if so, I don't think anyone doubts that they do have functional nuclear weapons. Maybe not all 5000 of them, but definitely enough to use them if they want to. I think the whole narrative of "well maybe Russian nukes don't actually work" is unhelpful - if they wanted to use nuclear weapons they would and the weapons used would work. I think people sometimes think Russia is North Korea experimenting with sticks t…

While I generally agree with your point presenting Russia as a decision making entity is dangerously misleading. You're not dealing with democracy or even 1970s committee-run USSR anymore. Sure Putin has broad support and a number of companions but he remains unilateral, undisputed, unchallenged decision maker. Assuming otherwise brings you back into the fold of rational actor argument which has proven a fallacy for…

This is just feel good nonsense… Russia has alliances or agreements with multiple major and minor countries including China. I don’t understand why people post these cope posts online unless it’s just to make themselves feel good.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#326

Post by boomskats »

pjc50 wrote: post #231
vintermann wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was a highly distributed, extremely flat, high skilled industry, with little to no management. It made it easy for the industry to rapidly grow and shrink, and made it extremely effective at producing bespoke products. ... That sounds a lot like the Norwegian shipbuilding industry which I work for right now. Maybe not with little management exactly, but nothing crazy either - significantly less than a British mu…

From the article re: Norwegian customers: "…every reported speech by a British shipbuilder in the Norwegian press usually comprised a list of excuses for poor performance, ranging from official and unofficial stoppages, shortages of labour, failings on the part of subcontractors, modernisation schemes not producing the anticipated results, to recently completed contracts having entailed substantial losses. The impres…

> My working theory is that British management over large groups of British workers collapses into class warfare.

Interesting. Care to share a bit more about your reasoning here?

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#327

Post by TitaRusell »

flir wrote: post #301
expedition32 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a country that is also a capitalist economy. Ofcourse they can build cargo ships. But those ships will be ten times more expensive than anything you can buy from Korea. Who is going to make up the difference?

The idea is that, if it's that important, you ultimately fund it from taxation. It's so important that it's really defence spending.

The UK has been slashing defence spending since WW2. And with reason the USSR lost because they couldn't afford the cold war anymore.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#328

Post by potato3732842 »

scott_w wrote: post #218
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 Fr…

Society can't ignore the cost.

But the bad faith peddlers of the costs sure can.

You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation, some additional labor overhead, some procedural change, some tweak of input sourcing or other reduction of outputs relative to inputs as being "amortized" over the course of whatever to much applause from the comment section.

And yet these same people are smart enough to recognize these sorts of dishonest "the solution to pollution is dilution" type arguments when applied in other contexts. It ought to make you wonder how much malice is sailing under the flag of ignorance.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#329

Post by justincormack »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #247
sefrost wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre. I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples. With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus. The triple lock is a politically motiv…

You touch on the core issue of the UK, but there's both a cultural and policy aspect. 1. As you say, an aging population has placed the entire country into a gridlock - the pensions system as it stands is ridiculous and unsustainable. Unfortunately, it is an almost immediate political suicide to even attempt to reform it. Young people are disillusioned and wield little monetary or political power. The old generation…

This is happening elsewhere too. France is in a very similar situation which keeps causing their government to fall apart.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#330

Post by loglog »

shevy-java wrote: post #322

Somehow the UK is really in a downhill trend. For decades. BREXIT kind of accelerated that; people such as Nigel Farage won't follow on their promise. There won't be noteworthy economic growth for the common man. The naval situation is even worse, because the UK totally depends on the USA now for its own nuclear arsenal. The UK has basically stopped being independent. Changing this will be hard and I don't think anyo…

The conclusions of the FT article are completely wrong. With fewer rich people around, chances are that legislation would be less frequently bought to benefit them at the cost of the country's overall prosperity.
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