Of all the various industrial strategies that could be tried:
His debut in British public life came in 1966, when he was asked by the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and his minister for economic affairs George Brown to become managing director of the newly announced Industrial Reorganisation Corporation.
Based on an Italian model, the IRC was intended to drag British industry into the modern era by writing blueprints for industrial sectors and promoting mergers to create “national champions”.
Why in buggery adopt an Italian one?
I googled “Italian Model” and am quite prepared to adopt one or two of them…
Obviously a motorhead: Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini….
Something to do with corporatism? Let’s not forget that it was the Italian socialist Benito Mussolini who invented fascism and the corporate state. While Mussolini and fascism were defeated there were huge chunks of the corporate state still in action after the war. And of course the British variant of fascism was started by ex-Labour Party socialist Oswald Mosley, who similarly worshipped the corporate state.
My thoughts entirely, Englishman, but MrsBud is adamantly opposed to the idea.
Because Italian industry was relatively functional at the time? Even western Europe was pretty statist, central-control, planned-economy, subsidies and favouritism, winner-picking at the time. Even a modest shift in a liberal direction would have worked. If Italy’s become left behind in the intervening 50 years, doesn’t mean it was behind then. (Well, obviously the south was and always will be).
Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. The very name sends a chill down the spine. I’m sure I read about it in Ayn Rand.
If the comrades hate capitalism so much, why do they keep calling their bureaus ‘corporations’?
The Italians did reasonably well in the 1950s and 1960s. If you look at PPP adjusted constant per capita GDP on the Penn Tables, Italy went from $6000 in 1950 to $13000. The UK goes from $10000 to $14000. The US went from $15000 to $22700.
OK some of this is postwar reconstruction and some is the convergence effect, but the UK averaged 2.2% and Italy averaged 4.9% (real per capita). 1960-1966 saw 2.3% in UK and 5% in Italy.
“Obviously a motorhead: Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini….”
But only those motorheads who can afford a BMW or Volvo to drive while the Bugatti, Ferrari or Lambo sits in the shop for weeks at a time.
A friend of mine is a certified Ferrari and Lambo mechanic (along with all the Germans), and he once spent half an hour walking me around a Lambo Countach pointing out all of the cosmetic and mechanical quality control failures on that particular car. My favorite? The wad of duct tape used to secure on of the front headlights after the factory line’s installer had managed to break the retaining bracket attempting to install the headlight.
One of the few joys I’ve experienced in late middle age is the reintroduction of Fiat to the U.S. market, joyous in large part because they’ve become the favorite of dimwitted hipsters everywhere. Now hipsters get to become acquainted with the three words that send chills down the spine of all motorheads of a certain age… Italian. Build. Quality.
If fact, about the only other three words I can think of that would be scarier to a motorhead would be… Lucas. Electrical. Components.
Don’t for Christ’s sake start giving Miliband ideas…
Has anyone pointed out that this has been tried in Britain already?
How did that work out?
Although the better example is this:
So how has having a “national champion” (i.e. a de facto monopoly) worked out for us?
We could have bought off the shelf M-16s for the cost of just the last re-design done by the German subsidiary of BAe. Although in fairness, BAe was not entirely to blame for the design work.
FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, the centerpiece of his New Deal legislation, was taken almost word-for-word from Mussolini’s Fascist laws. Of course, in the 1920s and early 1930s Mussolini was widely admired as the savior of Italy. By 1968 people should have known better.