In the Twilight of Great Britain

The saddest sight I see in China is an MG car.

The last three cars I owned were all MGs. The first two were built in Longbridge, Birmingham. The third was built in Nanjing, China, and Longbridge is now a housing estate. Delve into the long sad story that led to that result and you will be part way to understanding how the United Kingdom arrived at the sorry state it is in today. What we have seen in Britain over the past 70 years, slowly at first but now accelerating, is its transformation from a country, with all its faults, that one could be proud of, one which essentially served the people, one which was good to to live in: to being a shadow of its former self in which the economy is collapsing, poverty increasing as the standard of living is declining, one in which the priorities of its government are serving its American master, getting involved on the wrong side of conflicts around the world rather than serving the needs of its people, and arresting citizens who do no more than disagree with the policies it pursues.

But your mainstream news media won’t tell you about that. So let’s begin.

I was born just before the end of the second world war. My earliest memories are of abject poverty within my family. Let me dwell for a moment on those early post war years, as the generation which endured them is fast leaving the scene. The Labour government took control in 1945 of a bankrupt country, with a debt to the USA which would take more than 50 years to be paid off. But it did not impose a regime of austerity such as been suffered in this, the seventh richest country, since 2010, far from it. It introduced the National Health Service and initiated a colossal programme unmatched before or since of social housing which was continued by the Conservatives when they took power in 1951. The Conservative party at that time was far to the left of today’s Labour. You could say we had a uniparty back then too, but it was of the left.

My parents qualified for a brand new council house in 1952 paying a rent of 23 shillings and 4 pence (1.16 pounds, $1.52) a week. People started to acquire washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other household appliances. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 drove a rapid acquisition of TV sets (there was just one channel, the BBC). My parents bought a wreck of a prewar car in 1956 and were able to purchase a brand new Austin A40 in 1960. We had free medical care, including dentistry. I was paid a grant to go to university in 1963: yes, student loans had not yet been invented. The 1960s were a wonderful time to be alive: things were just getting better and better and the general feeling among the population was that their standard of living would continue to improve (and the music was great!).

Why shouldn’t it? Britain had led the world into the Industrial Revolution: my ancestors in Coalbrookdale, the Wildes, worked with the new coal-based iron production process in the early 1700s which set it off, and later in that century were among those who brought it to Merthyr, enabling the birth of industrial South Wales. It still led the world in many industries — aircraft and nuclear power being notable examples. Everything you saw then was proudly labelled  “Made in England”, and “Made in Japan” was a comedian’s joke (nothing of course was Made in China in those days). Virtually all the road transport, household goods, machinery and so on was British made.

But gradually the technical lead began to diminish and imports replaced home produced products. The turning point was the 1960s, it happened slowly at first, but industry leaders were too vain and stupid to realise what was happening. A simple example: there was once a thriving world class British motor cycle industry — Norton, Triumph, BSA, Royal Enfield — how they laughed when Honda entered the Manx TT in 1959! Just two years after their initial team TT failure, Honda confidently swept the top five places in every 1961 class in which they competed.  By the end of the 1960s the British motor cycle industry had been destroyed by Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki.

This should have been a warning, but pride and complacency stood in the way of understanding the situation. It can’t happen to the motor industry, they protested. By 1970 still only about 10% of new cars on the roads were foreign makes. But where now are Hillman, Austin, Rover, Humber,  Standard, and countless others? There is now no British owned, British made car, the last vestige, the microscopic Morgan Motor Company was sold to Italy in 2019. Most are dead and buried, but I can tell you that Rovers (now Roewe) are now built in Shanghai and as I said in the introduction, MGs are built in Nanjing, both their production lines being virtually given away in 2005.

The 1970s saw steady deindustrialisation but it sharply accelerated after the return of a Conservative government in 1979. Manufacturing, Margaret Thatcher told us, was just for the lesser breeds to deal with, Britain would now lead the world in moving on to being a service economy with finance at its centre, epitomised by the City of London and the spread of tax havens, an activity which the UK now dominates. Banks wouldn’t support industry, finance went into real estate, foreign currency and exchange rate speculation. It is impossible to ignore that another aim was to weaken the trade union movement which had bloodied the nose of the previous Tory government, so that labour law could be progressively dismantled, to the extent that we have now arrived at the zero hours contract, a horror that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. Social housing was also put up for sale, councils were not allowed to replace the loss and the money was frozen — I wonder what happened to that?

So manufacturing jobs dwindled and the production/service sectors balance was upset. A service economy needs a thriving production sector, ultimately somewhere down the line somebody has to be making something, or they have nothing to service. As time wore on, in work my junk email folder became inundated daily with offers of all manner of hand holding services which our company was perfectly able to perform itself or simply thrive perfectly well without, and the majority of these originated within the UK, while actual business supply approaches from British companies were so rare as to raise comment when they did arrive — our business was always virtually 100% export, we have never had a significant British customer for our main products in 30 years. Here’s some I savoured at the time:

Hi Walter, It’s Lindsey with BLASTmedia. As G2’s top PR agency, we’re champions for B2B SaaS brands steering the world toward a greener future...

I hope this message finds you well. My name is Chris Roberts, and I represent Virtu Sol, a leading provider of comprehensive business solutions for companies to expand their global presence and enhance customer experiences. ..

Hi Walter, I wanted to message you one last time about how Avrion and Maximizer CRM can help transform your manufacturing processes…

They always had stupid, pretentious, meaningless names, used acronyms I had never heard of and presumed to tell us that they could run our business better than we could.

Another factor that has weakened the manufacturing sector has been that with no controls on the sale of successful industries abroad, while they may continue to manufacture within the UK, creative accounting can mean the profits are assigned (and hence taxed) elsewhere, but inevitably, eventually, first the IP and then the production gets exported to the home base abroad. Within my own sphere of interest, City Technology, a world leading sensor company founded in 1974 by my fellow students was sold to Honeywell, and Lion Laboratories, the originator of hand-held breathalyser technology for whom I worked in the 1970s/80s was sold to MPD, another US company. Majority shareholding of key industries by foreign owned businesses should have been outlawed long ago. Many, basically monopolies such as water, gas, electricity, railways, should anyway be state owned. Interestingly while the railways were sold off along with everything else, they are still largely state owned: it’s just that the states are Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Hong Kong.

During this period, STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects in universities have been going into a severe decline. STEM graduates would be needed to power an industrial revival based on new advanced technology. Dwindling interest in science and computing, reduced confidence, less opportunity to do hands-on practical work, significant gender gaps and a lack of STEM-based work experience were all things reported by young people surveyed as part of the latest Science Education Tracker published earlier this year by the Royal Society and EngineeringUK, with support from Wellcome. Here is a table showing the world leaders in STEM education in 2020: UK, not even in the top eleven.

Incidentally, half of Chinese students are STEM.

So if UK students are not doing STEM subjects, what are they doing?

Here are the latest data for the top ten courses.

Amazingly, the favourite subject now is psychology. How many psychologists does the UK need? (Well, looking at the current state of the UK, perhaps it makes sense). Business and management feature prominently, but not much to stimulate new business to be managed. And apart arguably from Computer Science, not a single STEM subject in the top ten.

New advances in technology need a sound base in the pure sciences: chemistry, physics and biology etc. If we could persuade today’s British students to study the pure sciences, what world class universities does the UK have to inspire them? Here are the top 20 world institutions with the highest share of articles published in the top class scientific journals according to the Nature Index 2024, which is valid for the calendar year 2023.

Yes, Oxford is the only British university to make the list and scrapes in at number 20. Please note that China occupies the top spot, and 11 out of 20 in all.

It’s a lost cause, isn’t it?

And so the decline continued under the succeeding Labour Governments post-1997. My attention became diverted to China from 2006 - we started getting enquiries, they were all coming from the same place, Shenzhen, I had never heard of it, I had to look it up on a map - I went there and found a nascent industry just begging for our products, China soon became our biggest customer and I spent increasing periods of time there. Then, in 2015 the ruling class must have been asleep at the wheel, as Jeremy Corbyn sidestepped the controls and became the leader of the Labour party. This, it seemed to me (and I think to many others at the time), offered one last chance for the country to change direction. Labour soon had the biggest membership of any party in Europe. In 2016, Corbyn announced that a Labour government would create one million high-quality jobs by pumping £500 billion into manufacturing, and transport and communications infrastructure, including a National Investment Bank holding £250bn. He concluded that he would put power “back into the hands of those places outside of Westminster and the City of London.”  

I guess the latter helped seal his ultimate fate. Decried by some with the brainless phrase “throwing money” (if Labour could have done what it did when flat broke post 1945, there is no doubt that it could have been repeated), planned properly it would have been, as Corbyn described it, the investment that would help pay for itself by stimulating the economy and raising tax revenue.

It could, of course, have been partly accounted for by diverting money from utterly pointless expenditure such as endless military adventures abroad (I read recently that Britain has military bases in 17 foreign countries, admittedly not quite on a par with the USA’s estimated 800 bases outside its borders). How about restoring some normality to the military budget? The head of the British army has recently declared that Britain must prepare for war with Russia, China AND Iran by 2027. Hello, pal? Are you aware that in the event of WW3 the UK would be turned to a sheet of glass in 15 minutes? Russia, China and Iran don’t want to invade your decrepit, broken down has-been country, they have better things to do, why don’t you try making friends instead of enemies, moron? Isn’t it time this posturing of still being a World Power and acting as the USA’s useful idiot ceased, and the government gets out of NATO and concentrates its efforts on serving its own people? But no. Labour or Conservative, it’s “raise the military budget to 2.5%”, and “give 3 billion a year to Zelensky”, this latter money could almost have restored the cuts in child benefit introduced by the Tories and not restored by Labour. And Starmer, after saying the economy is in a bad state and that the October Budget will be painful, had the gall to announce that 200 billion will be spent on renewing Trident.

Clearly democracy has failed, but what democracy does the UK have? Head of state unelected, upper house unelected, the two main parties’ policies now virtually indistinguishable, and until recently the Foreign Secretary and even the Prime Minister were unelected. Top it off with an electoral system that gave Labour a landslide with just one person in five choosing to vote for them. That’s no mandate and it’s no democracy.

So I was very excited by the Corbyn leadership of Labour, I rejoined the party after a long absence, and worked within my constituency towards a Labour government. But as we know, he was undermined both without and within the party, and yet we came close, so damn close to doing it. Since when, the downward spiral has accelerated, driven by catastrophic combination of the triple whammy: Brexit, mismanaged Covid, and the sanctions on Russia which have done more damage to the EU and the UK than the intended target. Karma! (I must confess that I voted OUT, as I considered that a stupid question deserved a stupid answer, but looking at the current trajectory of the EU and its politics of lunacy, perhaps it was prescience). Finally, in despair, in 2020 I went back to China, and never returned. But I didn’t leave my country: my country had already left me.

Could it all have turned out differently? Of course. I will conclude with an example  – one of many, I am sure, but this one I was actively involved in — of a development opportunity spurned, a text book example of what went wrong with British R&D and what could have been. There was once a research consortium made up of a number of industrial investors at the BP Research Centre in Sunbury on Thames to develop a marketable fuel cell electrical energy source. It was called Energy Conversion Ltd, and my professor worked there prior to moving to academia. In 1969 when he arranged a grant from them for my study, they employed 300 staff. When I completed my PhD three years later, the staff had dwindled to four and my chosen career had gone up in smoke.

Recognising the difficulties attached to producing the successful fuel cell, attention had turned to development of a high power/weight rechargeable battery for road transport as an interim measure, and that was my actual PhD topic. Sounds familiar? I was working on a rechargeable zinc/air design, specifically the rechargeable air electrode, and perhaps in time if support had continued they could have got to the lithium ion battery which is coming to dominate road transport, but the money counters in the partnering companies lost patience and pulled the plug. A far seeing government would have stepped in and stayed the course, and Britain and the world could have been different places today if they had.

There have been a few fuel cell revivals since, some companies - BMW, Honda, Hyundai - are now producing small numbers of hydrogen fuel cell powered cars. China, having massively invested in lithium batteries and electric vehicles in markets they now dominate — batteries, 80% of world production, and as of January 2024, an estimated 20 million electric vehicles on the road, by far the most in the world – is saying the investment is moving on to fuel cells: projections suggest that the market will see 10,000 units by the end of 2024, grow to 50,000 units in 2025, and soar to over 1 million units by 2035. That I might live so long!

If you come to Shenzhen you would be amazed to see that all our taxis, buses, scooters and many commercial and private vehicles are all-electric. It may seem crazy to suggest it, but in an alternative scenario of a properly run Britain, it could have been MG, still being made in Longbridge, and not Shenzhen’s auto maker BYD, about to overtake Tesla this year as the world electric vehicle leader. There’s a thought.

Let’s now get to a summing up. First, here is a fun video which follows top national GDPs per capita from 1960 to 2020. Watch the UK struggle to stay with the pack, eventually sinking without trace in 2007. You may have to bang the red button a few times, otherwise select Watch on YouTube.

And so inevitably now in 2024, the UK economy is in a desperate state with no hope of recovery. Let’s list the top ten symptoms (in no particular order).

1. According to last year’s figures from the Trussell Trust, the number of people in the UK who needed emergency food supplies from food banks more than doubled in the last five years, to 3 million.

2. One in five households have trouble paying their water bills.

3. Many more are struggling to keep up with their energy costs. Electricity and gas prices have soared and five million households owe a record 3.1 billion pounds in unpaid bills. Energy prices will rise 10% on October 1 with a possible further rise in January. The Citizens Advice Bureau estimates that one in four households will have to turn off domestic heating and hot water this winter, and that a third will have difficulty affording food and other essentials. Energy suppliers’ profit which has amounted to 420 billion pounds since prices rose will increase by 9%.

4. Child benefit axed for more than two children, and a quarter of all children are now living in poverty. Four million will go to bed hungry, tonight.

5. Pensioners are being targeted for savings, Winter Fuel Payments are to be means tested, and it is said that this measure may even be applied to the pensions themselves!

6. Inflation has driven mortgage rates up by 4%, pushing 320,000 UK adults into poverty, house prices now out of reach for most, social housing virtually non-existent, and rents rising fast in private dwellings where every new posting receives an average of 20 applicants.

7. Unemployment is at 4.4% but this figure conceals those in part time employment and a million on zero hours contracts.

8. The NHS is incapable of providing the service it was set up for: I am receiving first hand reports of the depths to which it has sunk, endangering lives daily.

9. The price of fish and chips, once a cheap nutritious snack, increased by 50% as the price of cod and haddock rose by 75% in 2023 and many fish and chip shops are closing. While some blamed the rise on Russia’s response to UK’s part in sanctions, of failing to renew a contract signed in 1956 to permit fishing in the Barents sea, it seems that British trawlers do not fish there, and steep fuel and electricity price rises, crew shortages and Brexit are responsible.

10. Knife crime is rampant and street rioting is breaking out everywhere. Ostensibly this is about uncontrolled immigration, but it is evident that the British public’s sang froid is close to breaking point and I suggest that you ain’t seen nuthin yet.

    Britain is unmistakably in its twilight. Darkness follows...

And the current state of British manufacturing? Once a world leader in civil aviation it is now reduced to producing the wings for Airbus. We used to make our own trains at Swindon (appropriately the building is now a museum), now they are made by Japan. A pioneer in nuclear energy, it had to seek help from China to build another power station (until politics intervened and the plan was cancelled — China is our enemy, always has been, where did I hear that before? Ah. yes, 1984. The inventor of the modern iron and steel industry, in 2022 it produced 0.03% of world output. The table below shows the estimated manufacturing outputs for this year. Hello, the UK is now on a par with Indonesia: who knew?

Will the last person to leave the last factory in Britain please turn off the lights?

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/mg/93340/after-mg-rover-the-longbridge-legacy