That is all very well and good, but what is really needed is an appreciation of the communities and the political alternatives that they provided. Post-steel and post-coal localities need a radical industrial policy that would bring high-paid jobs, skills and opportunities that could form the basis of a real driver of levelling up. As the Port Talbot coke ovens close, what is the government doing to fill the void?
No, that is the big question. Forget about government or markets for a moment. Just concentrate on hte what.
So, what work – or industry or product or whatever – will provide large scale blue collar work as is being demanded?
Such a distinct, collectivist culture was crucial to the development of Wales, central Scotland and parts of England in the 19th and 20th centuries. At its peak in the 1960s, Port Talbot steelworks employed about 18,000 workers, complemented by the nearly 60,000 employed in south Wales coalmines. These industries after the second world war offered an alternative vision of industrial relations, investment, community development, and a Wales (and Britain) with working-class agency at its centre.
Great. But what?
No, windmills won’t do it. Solar won’t. No one, absoluitely no one, needs an organisation of that scale nor number of workers to produce those. Recycling is a value subtracting industry so that won’t provide either that pride or the wages. And on and on.
What is there in the modern world which will produce that large scale proletarian employment?
Anyone? Bueller?
“As the Port Talbot coke ovens close, what is the government doing to fill the void?
Keith Gildart is a former coalminer, and now a professor of labour and social history at the University of Wolverhampton”
There’s the answer, right there. The government has managed to ensure that all the descendants of the industrial proletariat are talking shit to each other in pissy little colleges.
Thanks, Mr. Blair!
On the basis that ultimately all production is for the purposes of consumption, what he’s suggesting is that we consume lots more stuff, which hardly meshes very well with his other hobby horse (or should I say source of income), the Big Green Society……..but then its Thursday, so Produce Baby Produce is today’s mantra. Tomorrow’s will probably be Consumption is Bad, Down With That Sort of Thing!
I dunno, it really is as if the 1970s had never happened.
I remember Nationwide had a digital clock on a counter and Val Singleton or someone explained that British Steel was losing two thousand squids a second.
The nationalised industries became purely employment bureaux, they were just there to provide jobs. They produced nothing of value, because everything was expensive and poor quality – that is on the few intervals when whatever industry was involved wasn’t on strike.
It is impossible to run heavy industry in the UK or indeed much of Western Europe. Green policies won’t allow it, nor will planning rules allow expansion or new development.
The answer ? Give them all a pointed stick, ship them off to the Estomian border and wait for the Russkis.
Something requiring large-scale use of manual labour?
How about repairing the roads?
Diverse, healthy employment in the open air, public good, social esteem
What’s not to like?
Then they could start on litter picking and flytipping
“Post-steel and post-coal localities need a radical industrial policy that would bring high-paid jobs, skills and opportunities that could form the basis of a real driver of levelling up.”
I’m pretty good at english after…roughly 4 decades of near-daily use in one form or another, but this bloke is not speaking it.
In the words of Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
War-huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing ….. except large scale proletarian employment
a radical industrial policy that would bring high-paid jobs, skills and opportunities
What part of “you’ll get the worst scum of the Third World as neighbours while you’re banned from flying, driving or central heating and will probably be jailed for hate crimes” is this professor not understanding?
Put them onto treadmills to produce electricity. That might keep a light on.
“Anyone? Bueller? “I got that reference (i think). Should they do a remake you should put your hat in the ring for career change 15.
’The nationalised industries became purely employment bureaux, they were just there to provide jobs. They produced nothing of value, because everything was expensive and poor quality – that is on the few intervals when whatever industry was involved wasn’t on strike…’
I hear you, I hear you, increase the size of the civil service, yes?
In the words of Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
War-huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing ….. except large scale proletarian employment
Edwin Star beat him to it with his 1970 song:
https://genius.com/Edwin-starr-war-lyrics
Automation means that most of the semi-skilled blue-collar jobs are done better, cheaper by machines – and with fewer Red Robbos.
The jobs for all these semi-skilled blue collar workers no longer exist.
This is why the Government is importing vast number of semi-skilled blue collar workers.
Cue General Melchett: “MAD!!!!! Neighhhh!”
Thing is, I’m pretty sure that these numbers like 18,000 no longer exist. Steel is mostly made by robots. According to Google, it’s 4,000 people. And a lot of those aren’t going to be blokes moving lumps of steel around, but quality control people, people improving the process. Like most of the weld team at Honda don’t touch a welding torch. They’re about monitoring and upgrading the robots.
I remember some news stories about how losing Honda would be a real blow for Swindon and frankly, most people didn’t even notice. Most of the town had nothing do with it. Most people found jobs quickly.
Places like Port Talbot and Swindon aren’t about t’mill, t’works or t’pit and haven’t been for decades, and some former miner who last dug coal over 30 years ago and is now hanging about with Marxists wouldn’t have a clue. Former industrial towns are mostly about lots of mid-size businesses that you’ve never heard of. The people who manufacture pharma, replacement hips, wheelchairs, parking meters. Companies that design the chips that go into cars. Or develop bits of software that go into iPhones.
“Industrial policy” is never going to bring “high-paid jobs, skills and opportunities” because politicians don’t have a clue. Like they’re still obsessed with car making, even though all movement is towards more cars being made in Eastern Europe, Asia, China. Building electric battery plants in the UK for car making?
We don’t need an industrial or levelling up policy.
We need a cheap energy policy, energy in the United Kingdom should be cheap and abundant and the government should work to that end.
We need a regulation reduction policy, all of the barnacles that have attached themselves to the hull of HMS Blighty, and which our EU-crazed homosexual politicians refuse to repeal, should be gutted.
We need to urgently make large sections of the antiproductive public sector unemployed, and lower taxes.
Basically we need a Milei.
PS – if AI can fill in forms (and it can), what do we need 500,000 civil servants for?
Automate those people to fuck.
Tim the Coder,
“Automation means that most of the semi-skilled blue-collar jobs are done better, cheaper by machines – and with fewer Red Robbos.”
Most physical manufacturing jobs in the UK are small scale or custom. Like Rolls-Royce only make about 200 engines per year, with lots of specialist jobs for each part. It’s not worth building a robot for most of the jobs. It’s not like car making where Honda were having to fit 4 million windscreens per year (and the windscreen robot does it perfectly every time).
Steve,
“PS – if AI can fill in forms (and it can), what do we need 500,000 civil servants for?”
You could solve most of that problem by just simplifying the hell out of what government does. You know, how many jobs does it take to get Welsh language onto their parking meters? Rather than just yelling “English, motherfucker, do you speak it?” at the Welsh people.
And you have this going on in Scotland now. Things are being done for Gaelic that even less people care about. You want to do your Higher in Physics, and have the paper in Gaelic? You can do that. Which means someone has to now write that paper in Gaelic, for literally less than a handful of people who take it.
Every little fun wheeze the politicians think up for the budget has to be coded by someone. People have to be trained in it, manuals have to be written for it. You have court cases about whether Jaffa Cakes are cakes or biscuits in terms of VAT, instead of just scrapping VAT completely and saving everyone a load of work.
BiND
It was the “Huh” ( more Hur-ah I think ) that was Frankie-ish. I don’t think a dude like E Starr would have tried that, he’d have sounded too gay.
“Basically we need a Milei.”
And much, much less Miliband.
Western Bloke,
Thing is, I’m pretty sure that these numbers like 18,000 no longer exist. Steel is mostly made by robots. According to Google, it’s 4,000 people. And a lot of those aren’t going to be blokes moving lumps of steel around, but quality control people, people improving the process. Like most of the weld team at Honda don’t touch a welding torch. They’re about monitoring and upgrading the robots.
There was a story a few years ago, which I think Tim covered here or elsewhere, about a sock making company that moved back to New York*. Off the top of my head but it went something like, bfore they left they employed 100s of people, when they came back they employed the proverbial 2 mean and a dog and produced more sock as well.
*From somewhere like Bangladesh or Indonesia.
decnine – from your words to Jehovah’s ear
WB – we can be more ambitious than that, I think.
Why is it so difficult, time consuming and annoying to contact [insert any layer of government you can think of]?
Instead of waiting on hold with HMRC for two hours, or being fucked around by your council planning department for months, why not make a chatbot front end and train AI to instantaneously deal with the thousands or millions of repetitive admin tasks we currently pay people to do badly and slowly?
But you’re right that simplifying the rules would be better. I think we can do both.
“Instead of waiting on hold with HMRC for two hours, or being fucked around by your council planning department for months, why not make a chatbot front end and train AI to instantaneously deal with the thousands or millions of repetitive admin tasks we currently pay people to do badly and slowly? ”
Sir, Sir I know the answer to this one!
Its so those pushing the pens get to decide what the masses can and can’t do, and f*ck the actual rules. We can’t possibly have bots implementing the rules, they might let the Deplorables do things we don’t want them to!
energy in the United Kingdom should be cheap and abundant and the government should work to that end.
Yep. Making it too expensive to make stuff in this country by inflating the price of power and then saying “looks like we will have to close all these uncompetitive industries” is demented.
It is not dissimilar to making farming in the UK uneconomic by insisting on a host of rules around food production (and charging vast sums for power) then saying, “duh! we don’t need all these farmers. We can import food from Goatfuckistan, where it definitely meets Red Tractor standards…”
Carbon Army, that’ll create jobs.
Gawd knows what they’ll do, probably feck up some insulation retrofits and heat pump installs and then a another lot called the Carbon Fix Army have to come along and repair or remove the stuff that doesn’t work.
It would be great if the UK could find a lower energy way of getting ammonia from nitrogen than Haber-Bosch – alas it cannot be invented and built here because net zero forbids such an innovation. Ammonia is net zero already because it’s all imported and the embedded emissions don’t count. Great work Miliband you bell.
@Ottokring
It was the “Huh” ( more Hur-ah I think ) that was Frankie-ish. I don’t think a dude like E Starr would have tried that, he’d have sounded too gay.
Literally the second (and thereafter oft-repeated word/exclamation in the Edwin Starr version is ‘Huh!’
(It was actually first recorded by The Temptations, who also give it plenty of ‘Huh’, though with less gusto than Edwin.)
@Marius
Making it too expensive to make stuff in this country by inflating the price of power and then saying “looks like we will have to close all these uncompetitive industries” is demented.
Ditto importing thousands of illiterates to do the sorts of jobs our own illiterates used to do but are no longer needed because the actual jobs don’t exist any more (as above).
It is so demented that it appears to me it must be being done by design, the object being to demoralise and eventually starve us, with the new illiterates being employed to keep us down in ways that our indigenous cops and squaddies might blanch at.
“It is not dissimilar to making farming in the UK uneconomic by insisting on a host of rules around food production (and charging vast sums for power) then saying, “duh! we don’t need all these farmers. We can import food from Goatfuckistan, where it definitely meets Red Tractor standards…””
Thats the policy of our host. Send all production abroad, who gives a f*ck about all those put out of work……
“Ammonia is net zero already because it’s all imported and the embedded emissions don’t count. ”
Are you sure about that? I’m sure farming is being ordered to reduce fertiliser usage in order to reduce its emissions.
Interested
Thank you for that tip.
I don’t know the Temptations version, I shall hunt for it when I have speakers available.
Interested: That’s what the Chinese do. When they wanted to clear out the Tiananmen Square occupiers, they kept the Beijing troops in their barracks, and brought troups from 1500 miles away who wouldn’t identify with the locals.
Haven’t they typically got that the wrong way around? A collectivist culture doesn’t generate big industry, big industry generates collectivist cultures.
The answer’s don’t make it so hard to start small businesses. Neither the steel mills nor the coal mines started as steel mills & coal mines. They started as a bloke bashing a bit of metal in his shed & another bloke digging a bit of coal to keep the house warm. The answer’s with thousands of individuals out there if they’d only let them get on with it.
” The answer’s with thousands of individuals out there if they’d only let them get on with it.”
Let a thousand blokes in sheds bloom!
BiS
This, but it ain’t going to happen.
Most of the modern brainwashing – Agenda 2030 and the rest of the corporate/fascist agenda – relies on increased state control and regulation; provides control over both the population and (large business) production. Small business (or any aspect of individuality) will increasingly not be any requisite part of this dystopian future.
PF is bang on.
I see so many people on here just talking past each other, with one side stuck in the old left/right Labour/Tory thing.
The State let us havr a bit of a go at starting small businesses and having freedom of speech and assembly and all that, but that was before the internet developed to the point it has now.
Even in Stalin’s Russia people talked in secret and passed samizdat stuff round, and there was ‘another side’ to escape to in the West.
Now we effectively all live in Stalin’s Russia, minus (for now) the murders and the gulags but plus the ability for the State to monitor almost everyone all of the time.
It’s all rather concerning.
The answer’s don’t make it so hard to start small businesses. Neither the steel mills nor the coal mines started as steel mills & coal mines. They started as a bloke bashing a bit of metal in his shed & another bloke digging a bit of coal to keep the house warm. The answer’s with thousands of individuals out there if they’d only let them get on with it.
How the Industrial Revolution happened.
Lord Farnsbarns estate in Staffordshire circa 1710.
“I say Ted, what’s that stuff you’re digging up?”
“That be coal sir, I uses it to heats the stove.”
“I see, is there a lot of it ?”
“Oh aye, sir, goes right through that hill.”
“Fascinating. I wonder if there is any more on my estate in Yorkshire.”
Lord Farnbarns travels to Sheffield and there meets Mr Ebeneezer Shuttleworth, Ironmaster.
“Aye, sithee, Lord Farnsbarns, Ah’ve just got a big order from t’Army to make bayonets.”
“I see, what do you use to heat your forges.”
“Charcoal, but it’s very inefficient tha knows. Coppicing and all that, is a reet pain in t’ jacksie.”
“Ah… I might be able to help you there…”
Some months later, Lord Farnsbarns is in London and visiting the Royal Society.
“I say Newcomen, what’s that ? Looks intriguing.”
“I call it a ‘steam engine’ m’lord. All sorts of uses, but best for pumping water.”
“Ah. I have a mine near Wolverhampton that keeps on flooding, d’you reckon this’ll do the trick ?”
“Oh yes sir.”
A few months later, Lord Farnsbarns meets another chap who convinces hm that the most efficient way of transporting heavy goods is on barges along man made waterways, dug by Irishmen…
And so on…
Steve,
“Instead of waiting on hold with HMRC for two hours, or being fucked around by your council planning department for months, why not make a chatbot front end and train AI to instantaneously deal with the thousands or millions of repetitive admin tasks we currently pay people to do badly and slowly?”
Or just follow the path the private sector took of automating those tasks. Give people self-service tools via browsers. Have workflow systems that automatically notify people when actions have been taken.
Specsavers, Easyjet, Amazon all manage this. I don’t need their chatbots, but I know what service I’m paying for. And they just give me simple tools. Like I can book an appointment with Specsavers online. When my specs are ready, they SMS me. Why can’t the NHS do that?
Part of it is that Specsavers manage their money wisely. They don’t come up with billion pound IT projects. They work on stuff that costs less than £100K and get it done. And then they use the savings to start saving some more. The public sector absolutely piss money away on software projects that never get delivered. And no-one gets fired or yelled at for it.
@jgh
Yep re the Chinese. Exactly that.
@Otto
“Aye, sithee, Lord Farnsbarns, Ah’ve just got a big order from t’Army to make bayonets.”
This bit definitely rings true. People think Biden left billions of dollars of shit which would need replacing behind in Afghan for reasons other than it would need replacing.
Interested
I’ve just found the Temptations version on YT. Thought it better than Starr’s, even.
I think it must be tight trousers that facilitate a really good “Huh !”
The next video was Springsteen doing the song. Bloody hell, he doesn’t half go on…
@decnine – “And much, much less Miliband.”
That’d be a Microband. Or maybe even a Nanoband.
Brilliant by Ottokring.
On ammonia – embedded emissions produced abroad before it comes to the UK don’t count for net zero purposes. The additional climate affecting emissions from using the N2 fertilisers here do count.
As I understand it of course.
WB – you are absobloodylutely right.
The software guys, the developers, are absolutely creaming it on specialist software contracts (no doubt supporting some ancient pubsec shitware that was coded in Pascal for Windows XP), what with the cheap to hire, expensive to rent Indian coders and eye watering managed service and change control contracts for stuff that could probably be rebuilt in ServiceNow and taken out of that stupidly expensive (for what you get) DC anyway.
I mean tiny government department-lets you’ve never even heard of, spaffing literally millions of pounds maintaining legacy crapware.
But it’s even scarier when they try to “improve” things so I dunno. But the usual problem is, they either don’t have budget to innovate (even when it would lead to savings), or they fuck up the procurement with project creep and awarding it to Accenture or Capita.
Dominic Cummings was right, but obviously destined to lose from Day Uno in his Quixotic tilt at the civil service. They insist on ridiculous low prices on things that it’s unwise to skimp on, but happily spaff budget elsewhere without the blink, because it’s always been that way since 1996.
The public sector cannot measure value. It employs some surprisingly talented and dedicated people who make it all sort-of-work, but it’s a system that’s dysfunctional, above the make-sure-the-bins-get-collected level and they can’t even do that.
Six bins? Fuck off.
Interested is right, but doom looping is a very painful road. It has gotten better before. It will get better again.
The important thing is the thing that was always important: try not to worry about the things you can’t control, and show love, empathy and kindness and good judgement in the things you can control.
Or a shotgun if COVID 24 turns people into 5G Rage zombies, which a dear friend informed me in all sincerety might happen any day now, because of the vaccine of course.
Life is like an ashtray, isn’t it, dearieme?
Full of little doubts.
Marius – what gives me some degree of optimism is that we have a bounty of untapped hydrocarbons, begging to be exploited. Plus the know how to make Jetsons style small modular reactors as common as telephone exchanges used to be.
As soon as the lions win, Great Britain will be motoring.
Jim – you’re right, but we’re at the point where even the public sector is broke. Councils facing bankruptcy. NHS trusts in financial trouble. Doing the same thing as before is unaffordable. I don’t expect big changes soon, but I do think public sector AI will be here sooner than you might think.
BiS – I want all of my children to have a trade (plumbing, electrician, hairdresser or whatever). These are traditionally working class jobs, while we are solidly middle class people who live in an episode of the Archers. My wife is more Felicity Kendal than Hyacinth Bucket, but still – she’s as much of a snob as any good woman. So it may seem like we are downwardly mobile.
But I don’t think so. I think university is already ludicrously oversaturated, and mostly worthless in the pursuit of big money. I reckon the doers will always be able to earn a crust without having to sell their soul to an evil multinational corporation, as I have.
I don’t want my kids doing something a robot or an offshore Indian guy can do cheaper (or “cheaper” until Babu cheerfully costs the company a fortune in mistakes). And a smart plumber or hairdresser can become a millionaire, with a bit of hard work, entrepreneurislism and a good accountant.
I think I’m giving my kids a better chance in life by steering them towards necessary but potentially lucrative prole jobs that also would afford them some degree of economic independence and a greater likelihood of getting married and producing grandkids earlier in their 20’s than going to yooni (prolonged childhood) affords.
Wish me luck x
“What is there in the modern world which will produce that large scale proletarian employment? “
On Day 1, we’re all lined up and counted off as “1”s or “2”s. The “1”s are issued a pile of trash, the “2”s are issued bags.
The next day, we start. The “1”s spread out their trash, the “2”s pick it back up and bag it. The following day, we switch roles. Ad infinitum.
Every day, Elon Musk distributes to us all our 2500-calorie pill, made from his zero-grav mold grown on his Earth Ring system, on which all of the PTB live.
Every year, a lottery sends 100 of us high-performers up to live on The Ring. That gives us all incentive to pick up our trash really well.
Steve,
“I think I’m giving my kids a better chance in life by steering them towards necessary but potentially lucrative prole jobs that also would afford them some degree of economic independence and a greater likelihood of getting married and producing grandkids earlier in their 20’s than going to yooni (prolonged childhood) affords.”
It doesn’t really matter if it’s prole jobs or things that we might consider as middle class, graduate work, but what’s important is adding value to your fellow man and keeping that in your mind. Like going to university to study to be a vet is a good idea. Lots of people want Fido to be made better and will pay for you to do it. Studying English or history? Not so much.
And I think a lot of parents indulge this, they let it happen. They send their kids off to yooni to do photography without even checking if that’s a good idea and talking to their kids about it. Anyone who knows the industry knows that no-one cares about degrees and that most photographers learned by getting Amateur Photographer delivered every week (£150/year), in the days before All Shall Have Degrees. It’s really not even a great field to go into. Most photographers treat it as a side hustle, doing it for the joy of it, and making a few quid here and there.
>What is there in the modern world which will produce that large scale proletarian employment?
War.
Go invade France. You know you want to;)
Tsk, we’re British, we prefer a challenge.