Carl Mortished: We are sleep-walking into a grim post-industrial future

Countryside: 'Success in industry meant becoming a gentleman farmer and retiring to a Palladian mansion in the Home Counties.'

Pointillist

Carl Mortished

27 February 2019

After four decades of reconstruction, Britain’s industrial renaissance is in peril but it’s not clear that the country is all that bothered.

In Swindon, a Japanese factory is to be shut down and the business of making vehicles and car engines taken back to Japan.

Another Japanese motor investment in Sunderland is cancelled and Ford, the American carmaker is threatening to stop investing if the UK falls out of the European Union.

Margaret Thatcher’s grand plan to make Britain a manufacturing gateway to Europe is to be shredded.

It was working well — she rid Britain of bad working practices, bad managers and she opened the door to investment and competition from Europe, letting weak UK businesses fail. British car output collapsed as old brands went on the rack but, since the financial crash, output soared with billions invested.

Since the Brexit vote, however, the money has dried up and we need to ask the question; do we want an industrial nation?

Britain does not like industry. Thatcher knew it, that hangover from the Victorian horror of the dark satanic mills and the dirty business of making stuff. Back in the Seventies, boardrooms were full of so-called professionals: lawyers, accountants and City types.

Success in industry meant becoming a gentleman farmer and retiring to a Palladian mansion in the Home Counties.

Thatcher’s brutal cull brought in a new wave of more ruthless owners in the Eighties and Nineties as well as managers schooled in American business school ideas but I think there is still a residual cultural antipathy to industry.

In 1981, an American academic, Martin Wiener, wrote English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980 — a vicious critique of the English establishment’s sentimental attachment to an arcadian pre-industrial England.

Unlike in France, Germany, the US and Japan, the class of doers, strivers and makers never truly seized cultural power from owners of land and a great many Britons would not just agree with Rudyard Kipling that “England is a garden that is full of stately views” but that it should remain so, even at the cost of jobs and wealth.

Wiener’s book was hailed by some Thatcherites but condemned by others as too American. The truth can be painful. Consider that in the US, the name Henry Ford conjures up a hero of industry as well as a ruthless employer but nonetheless an American icon — a pioneer.

In Britain, the name William Morris is more associated with the Victorian textile designer and his wallpaper designs than with his namesake who founded Morris Motors — the first British automotive production line in Cowley, Oxford.

In a deeper irony, the more feted artistic Morris was the author of a utopian fantasy, News from Nowhere, in which he extolled a pre-industrial world without machines.

These ideas remain hugely powerful — think only of JRR Tolkien.

Tolkien hated technology, America and motor cars. Over Christmas, I watched Peter Jackson’s impressive cinematic creation of the Lord of the Rings and his depiction of the industrial machine in which the fallen wizard Saruman manufactured his orc armies. The message is clear: industry is evil and will destroy the Earth.

As we move towards the Brexit deadline, nowhere in the debate about national identity and Britain’s relationship with Europe is there any discussion of industry and Britain’s commercial purpose in the world.

The Brexiteer cheerleaders, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, cannot explain how British manufacturers will thrive in a new world of tariffs and protectionism.

Yet, we are now told by Michael Gove, the Brexiteer Environment Secretary that British livestock farmers need have no fear outside the EU because their produce will be protected from competition.

Therein lies the ghastly truth: come the end of March, Britain will be alone, shunned by foreign investors, its industrial base eroding but its green hills and valleys alive with lambs and cattle, all protected at the expense of consumers.

It will be good for one industrialist, Sir James Dyson, who fancies himself as a gentleman farmer. He has bought 35,000 acres of land on which he last year collected £3 million in EU farm subsidies.

Are we to go full circle? In 1959, the industrial Morris (by then Lord Nuffield) said Britain was “a nation in semi-retirement”.

By the 21st century, the UK seemed to have found a new life in Europe. It would be a shame if it was sent back to rot in a bungalow by the sea.

Carl Mortished: We are sleep-walking into a grim post-industrial future

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