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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

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Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#351

Post by sefrost »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #105
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…

>anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension. Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.

Actually once you are back in your home country (or in fact any other country) you can pay an optional £180/year to buy a full qualifying year.

Anybody who ever worked in the UK can do it and you don’t need to have ever been a citizen.

There are adverts on Irish radio about it quite often.

It’s an absolutely terrible deal for the British government when you consider how high the state pension annual payout is.

I live in another country right now and I do it myself!

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#352

Post by energy123 »

loglog wrote: post #330
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.

If you insist on only focusing on the negatives of their existence, then sure, eliminating wealthy people sounds like a good idea.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#353

Post by varshar »

Aromasin wrote: post #221
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come…

The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline. In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis. The US in the 197…

Well put.

More broadly - the United Kingdom exports services worth £500+ billion each year (versus goods worth £400 billion or so).

And these service exports have grown 6-7% on average for the past decade and show no signs of slowing down.

Good exports have flatlined but certainly not collapsed.

Source: ONS UK trade, August 2025 - https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay...

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#354

Post by jack_tripper »

dwayne_dibley wrote: post #340
parados wrote: post #332

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards). The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems: - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. - Poor quality management. "Working in trade…

'"Working in trade" had a low social status' I think the push in the 90's to drive everyone to university also had a big negative impact on the status of 'working in the trades'.

Don't worry, this trend has been in reverse the past couple of years.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#355

Post by dylan604 »

dijit wrote: post #343
AppleBananaPie wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing :) I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one. And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials). The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food. This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" co…

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#356

Post by lenerdenator »

parados wrote: post #332

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards). The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems: - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. - Poor quality management. "Working in trade…

> - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world.

> - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.

I see these as ultimately being caused by your third point:

> - Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim?

You remove the problems by paying those workers more to be more productive. You pay them more by having more capital with which to do so.

The threat of nationalization exists because capital is unwilling to do this. Why pay Tommy Adkins more when you can set up a shipbuilding yard in a country with loose regulations, low labor costs, and an authoritarian government that's willing to grind the proles into hamburger if they speak up about either of the former issues?

Ultimately, when you can do that, there's no amount of anything that the workforce in the UK, or any other developed nation, can do to keep up. You have to either instill the nationalism in capital, or scrap the entire enterprise.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#357

Post by jack_tripper »

lm28469 wrote: post #287
inglor_cz wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe, we are in the middle of a very expensive and long term decarbonization push, an order of magnitude (if not two) more expensive that what France did. In fact, it is so expensive that the question if we can even pull it off is still open. That does not seem to support your idea that "everything gets cut down over short term costs now". There is a massive amount of long term spending happening right now.

Oh sure we do spend, on foreign tech, foreign factories, &c. That's not what I call long term vision, if anything it's the opposite. Germany was Putin's bitch because of gas, now the whole EU will be China's bitch for panels and batteries, amazing! FYI: China produces >70% of windmills blades, solar panels and lithium batteries What I meant by vision is securing the long term independence of your country through home…

>we outsourced everything to Asia and kept "services", which aren't worth much when shit hits the fan.

Don't worry, those "services" are now being outsourced too this time around.

What's left is stakeholders, scrum masters and managers to boss those offshore workers around while they use ChatGPT.

It's all a big comedy show and we are born just in time to get the front row seats.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#358

Post by dijit »

dylan604 wrote: post #355
dijit wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials). The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food. This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" co…

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.

I think you missed my point.

My point is that we’ve inversed the “value” of each sector.

The highest good you can do for civilisation/society is also the least profitable.

The lowest good you can do for civilisation is the most profitable.

Thus our incentives are opposed diametrically from the benefit of society.

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#359

Post by kelipso »

varjag wrote: post #346
kelipso wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aside from you apparently replying to some other comment than mine: Russia honors no treaties or alliances except when it's convenient.

I am replying to you comment. You are doing the exact same thing again. Saying “Russia honors no treaties or alliances except when it's convenient” is just so you can feel better about whatever. It’s just not how reality and geopolitics work…

Re: How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

#360

Post by orochimaaru »

parados wrote: post #332

Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards). The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems: - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. - Poor quality management. "Working in trade…

Maybe the decline of manufacturing in the UK correlates with freedom of its colonies? There is loss of access to cheap raw material as well as a dumping ground for finished products.
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