Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 27

If there is one industry which symbolises Britain’s transition from imperial power to ‘just another European country’, it is shipbuilding. At the end of the nineteenth century Britain had the largest shipbuilding industry in the world, the largest merchant fleet and the largest navy. The combination of circumstances which underpinned that supremacy began to fall apart in the inter-war years, and at a faster rate after 1945. One by one the great shipyards on the Clyde, the Tyne and the Wear wilted in the face of foreign competition, and no amount of support from the government could stop the rot. By the end of the 1990s only fragments were left of an industry which had once ruled the world.

This is often seen as an egregious British failure, attributable to specifically British weaknesses. Incompetent managers and bloody-minded trade-unionists figure prominently in popular explanations of what went wrong. Yet other European shipbuilders fared almost as badly. Even the Swedish shipbuilding industry, much admired in the 1950s and 1960s for its technical progressiveness and its stable labour relations, was overwhelmed by competition from low-cost yards in Japan and South Korea, the two countries which have come to dominate the world shipbuilding scene. The near-demise of merchant shipbuilding in Britain is as much a European as a British phenomenon. What was distinctive about the British case was the size of the industry at the start of the post-war period, and the extent to which its response to competition was conditioned by its earlier history.