Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 34

The last chapter described how, in the 1960s and 1970s, successive British governments intervened in an attempt to save the shipbuilding industry from decline. In steel, a much larger industry than shipbuilding and traditionally regarded as even more vital to the economic health of the nation, government intervention was more continuous, and had a more pervasive influence on performance. Nationalised twice and privatised twice, steel was meddled with by politicians to a greater extent than any of the other industries discussed in this book, with the possible exception of aerospace. These were not the best conditions in which to build an efficient, internationally competitive industry, and at the end of the 1970s steel-making in Britain was in a parlous state; the productivity gap between Germany and Britain was wider in steel than in any other major industry.¹ Fortunately the damage was not irreparable. This is a case of an old industry which, unlike shipbuilding, did not fade away, but survived into the 1990s in surprisingly good shape.