Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 33

The shipbuilding story has some similarities to that of cotton textiles described in Chapter 3. Both were large and once-dominant industries. Both faced a disruptive change in their trading environment after the Second World War, arising in one case from the growth of low-cost imports from the developing countries, in the other from the rise of Japan. In both cases memories of the inter-war slump engendered a defensive attitude which discouraged investment and inhibited innovation in design and production methods.

Could the government have done more to help? The first Labour government under Clement Attlee has been criticised by some historians for not doing enough to modernise British industry. But even if the political conditions of the time had been conducive to large-scale government intervention, it was far from clear what form modernisation should take. Civil servants did not have the knowledge or experience to formulate a comprehensive plan for the industry; if they had tried it, the result might well have been misdirected investment on a substantial scale.

A more valid criticism is that when governments did intervene in the 1960s and 1970s, the effect was to delay change. The Geddes committee assumed too readily, in line with the fashion of the time, that the consolidation of the industry into larger groups would improve efficiency. As with the Courtaulds plan for reorganising the textile industry, the committee and the government exaggerated the advantages of size and under-estimated the difficulties of making mergers work. Following the Geddes report, government subsidy was used to preserve existing yards and existing jobs. In the case of the Govan yard, it took the imminent prospect of liquidation and the arrival of new owners to initiate the necessary reforms. It is possible that if British shipbuilders had been faced with a starker choice between adjustment and extinction twenty years earlier, they might have been quicker to tackle their internal inefficiencies and rethink their product and marketing strategies.

The Thatcher government has been attacked on the opposite grounds, that it was too ruthless in denying the industry support and that it failed to consider ways of preserving a small but viable core of merchant shipbuilding capacity. Other European countries, including Germany and France, subsidised their shipbuilding industries during the 1980s and 1990s to a greater extent, and their share of the world market, though far below that of Japan and South Korea, is greater than Britain’s. However, these subsidies were largely a response to local political pressures, and there is no indication that they will produce in the long run a commercially successful industry.⁴¹

Of the three institutional weaknesses referred to in Chapter 1, the financial system and the education system seem largely irrelevant in this case. Labour relations, on the other hand, have been widely regarded as a principal factor in the industry’s decline. It is certainly true that the old-established system of craft control was an obstacle to modernisation, and that shipbuilding suffered more than most other British industries from the sectionalism of the trade union movement. But even if labour relations had been drastically reformed in the 1950s – perhaps a move to a single union for all shipyard workers and an end to demarcations between trades – it is far from certain that the industry would have done much better. The fundamental reason for the industry’s failure to profit from the boom in world shipping in the 1950s and 1960s lay in the inability of management to adapt their product and marketing strategies to the changed conditions of the post-war world. A few companies, such as Austin & Pickersgill, did adapt successfully, and the trade unions did not prevent them from doing so. Bad labour relations were a contributory factor in the industry’s decline, not its central cause.