Sting, who wrote the music for the show and will star in a run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in September, said the closure of the shipyards began an era when the north of England was failed by successive governments.
“Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards,” he said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
Manufacturing output is, of course, up since then. Also, every rich country lost its coal, steel and shipbuilding, so it wasn’t Maggie there either.
But, you know, the bass player, eh?
Lol
Good old Sting, as thick as ever ( ex teacher dontcha know )
All those industries were already screwed in the 1930s. It was only the war and nationalisation that kept the coal, steel and shipyards open.
I’ve just been listening to a podcast on the General Strike and they made the point that even the coal mining in this country was under threat and declining.
Spot Maggie in this…
And the longer view…
From https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6498/uncategorized/the-decline-of-the-uk-coal-industry/ and
://www.economicshelp.org/blog/215980/economics/the-spectacular-decline-of-the-uk-coal-industry/
Nah, Doxford & Sunderland was profitable without subsidies until well after Court Line took it over but the holiday company collapsed and it was nationalised. The rescue of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders damaged the rest of the industry which until then had managed without subsidies.
The steel companies were OK until Wilson nationalised them (when private the only loss-making steel company was Richard Thompson & Baldwins in Nye Bevan’s constituency). British Steel’s decision to build its new mill in the constituency of an influential Labour MP many miles from any of its blast furnaces (or any customers) was the first sign that the nationalised industry was going to self-destruct.
profitable but still in decline?
D&S wasn’t in decline, pretty much flat. Harland & Wolff was in decline got effectively bailed out by getting the order for a new Cunard liner Govan was a disaster but they aren’t North-East. I think Swan Hunter was struggling but I cannot remember. D&S was prospering because it was the only yard in the UK which tried to build a series of (more or less) identical ships which was much more efficient than having to learn the job anew on every new ship (that was so memorable that I can still remember it 50+ years later).
I never understand what people think that Mrs Thatch did.
The reality is that the shift just happened on her watch. Computers and telecoms created large, global service industries. Robots killed manufacturing jobs. Plus, do you want to be poorly paid in a stinky shoe factory or well paid in a nice office? Right. Let someone else make them.
The shoes we make now are the well paid ones from Church’s and Barker (good factory shops if you happen to be around Northampton).
Yep, most of those complaining never worked at a coal face or on a factory floor. You’ll never find a miner who will recommend working in a pit.
In the article Sting himself states he would *never* want to work in any of the Industries, and went out of his way to avoid having to work ….etc…
“I’m not trying to Romanticise , but there’s still that Romance about…..”
As usual the Hypocrisy is Real… Clogs, Tulips and Windmills nostalgia while ignoring the actual reality of the times for the Narrative…
We’re only making plans for Nigel
His whole future is with British Steel…
True. But. I was born and brought up in a Derbyshire mining village in the 1940/50s. Most of my contemporaries after leaving school were working “down ‘t pit”. They couldn’t see any alternative. For the record, I had enlightened parents.
Except in BBC plays….
They think she beat the Labour Party in elections, so she must be a witch and deserves to be burnt at the stake.
My late father was a leather merchant, born and bred in Northampton. He sold leather to Church’s, Barker’s, Grenson et al. I used to wear Loakes brouges to school – all my mates took the piss of my posh shoes.
A fairly regular feature of 1950s British literature and film is the protagonist declaiming “I don’t want to spend my life working in a factory”.
As nicely sent up by Monteeee Pythonin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQDeU6dHX-c
One of their best, that one.
The North-East was failed by the Wilson government; Frank Cousin’s demands for national pay rates for unionised jobs made engineering factories in the North-East uncompetitive with those in the south that had lower transport costs; more of Durham’s coal mines were closed under Labour than under Mrs Thatcher; .
Since when did the Graun let facts interfere with the Narrative?
Unless that a trick question: since sometime after I last read it
When I moved to the North-East in 1975 the area was full of closed, decaying pits, steelworks and shipyards. Almost all of those still open had closed by 1979.
But Sting is all about meaning. As a pop songwriter and performer he’s worth the money, mind, if you ignore his mithering.
That was thanks to Wilson (and Attlee). The massive pay rises given to coalminers made coal too expensive (it was cheaper to ship coal from Colombia than buy it from the NCB and somebody did) – and of course that made steel and shipbuilding uncompetitive.
Saw a documentary film about Easington Colliery recently. There was a drinking culture, the racism, the bullying, the entitlement beliefs that jobs should go to family and if not then to locals, but definitely not to anyone in Peterlee – that wasn’t local.
Quite a nice place now that the pit and the council offices have gone. Well nicer, it’s all relative.
What racism? I’m puzzled. The last census I said that Easington was the only census area in the country that was over 99.5% “white British” (which I assume is because there were no jobs except in the colliery# so no-one *ever* wanted to migrate there).
#OK council offices and the local co-op but I meant real jobs
I suspect the locals had forthright views about – well, just about anyone who wasn’t a local – but given that there were no obvious non-locals there, opportunities to put those views into effect were rare.
I’m racist against Martians. Does that make me an active, practicing racist?
Martians are easy to deal with. Just close the visor on their Roman helmets.
Or play Western Yodelling music to them.
Pretty much true Norman. The current culture is that it’s wrong to be racist. In the 70s the local view was it was ok to make racist comments in the workplace, jokes in WMCs, disparage those US imported dramas and sitcoms, as long as you treated the individuals on their merits, but it still meant that outsiders didn’t come here and take your cousin’s job.
I can remember watching the telly news as a boy, as one set after another of very stupid trade unionists did everything they could to accelerate the demise of their industries.
Fuck ’em all.
They still exist, or rather their equally stupid descendants. c.f. Our Angie’s Workers’ Rights Bill.
A friend of mine when I said I couldn’t stand Sting. “But you have a double album of The Police and you play it fairly often, his musical style didn’t really change”. My answer was “but his overt politics started grating on me”.
Andy and Stewart rather helped cover it up.
True Otto. Don’t even start me on Midnight Oil. Great music, I went to a few of their concerts when I was young and stupid. Now I’m old and stupid and the lyrics make me grit my teeth.
I knew a chap once who joined the Army to get away from the northern shipyards where his grandfather, father, uncles, brothers, and cousins all worked.
It struck me that this sounded a bit nepotistic, and he looked at me like I was somewhat slow and said, words to the effect of, ‘Aye too fookin reight ye canny gerra job in the fookin shipyads wi’out yer owld maan wukkin there’.
On top of which it paid well, and they hardly did any fucking work either (he reckoned).
Lot of sitting round reading Razzle, drinking, playing cards and the occasional bit of riveting. They did it to themselves.
If you read The Jervis Bay by Thwaites, he goes on about the laziness of shipyard workers even in wartime.
I thoroughly recommend this poem, especially to young people it is both stirring and heart-wrenching and is easy to edit down into smaller modules.
Nicholas Monsarrat, from his autobiography, on life ashore between convoy duties:
Most of these people ‘concerned with our refit’ were hardly concerned at all. They were not working very hard. Some of them, as far as I could judge, were not working at all. The first time I came upon a school of card-players snugged down in the captain’s sea cabin at ten o’clock in the morning, I was furious, and showed it. I remained furious on all later occasions, but I was officially told not to be, and above all not to ‘interfere’. There might be a strike … In July, a member of the Boilermakers’ & Iron and Steel Shipbuilders’ Society (there must have been a whole gang of them on board at that very moment) had been fined £3 by his union’s board of discipline for working too hard.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m the last person to criticise anyone for skiving off from the dirt, danger and drudgery of hard industrial labour. But that is the very reason why the vast expansion in non-manual employment under Thatcher and her successors is something to celebrate, not moan about.
The reason why we celebrate the vast expansion of non-manual labour is that just about everyone gets paid well enough to live in comfort our grandfathers associated with the upper-middle-class without the dirt, danger, disease and injuries (too often fatal) associated with manual labour.
The film I’m All Right Jack wasn’t really satire.
I was living near Sedgefield at the time when Swan Hunter finally closed. A local joke told of a visitor to Swan Hunter who saw a procession of stretcher bearers carrying bodies. He said to his host, “That must have been a terrible accident”. Host replied, “Nah. That’s a team of welders being carried from one job to another”.
Reminds me of:
The dockyard mateys’ children
Sit on the dockyard wall
Watching their big, fat fathers
Doing, it seems, fuck all.
And when those children grow up
What do you think they’ll do?
Sit on their big, fat backsides
Doing fuck all too.
It was nationalisation by Labour wot done it. Lack of private capital, greedy, bloated, unionised work-force, out of date equipment, poor management, shoddy workmanship – the State-run industries were inefficient, low labour productivity, uncompetitive in the global market, vastly costly to the Treasury, thus to the taxpayer. Apart from that.
Many more pits closed pre-Thatcher than after she was elected.
The point I’ve never see made (because, perhaps, I’m wrong!) is that there simply isn’t enough added value in metal-bashing to support the lifestyle to which we now like to become accustomed, and which we now think we deserve. Ship-building with rivets and a cast of thousands is fine if all you want is a terraced back-to-back with a shared cludgie in the back yard, but if you want modern comforts you must either work much harder and more efficiently (South Korea?) or do something other than metal-bashing.
The added-value in metal-bashing is the difference for the price at which you can sell the product and the cost of materials. The selling price depends, in part (often a large part) on what competitors are charging for an equivalent product. Where there isn’t an equivalent it’s the value that a buyer puts upon the product and/or the cachet attached. Rolls-Royce Motors has been profitable longer than I can remember (although Tony Benn managed to wreck the Aero-engine side). British shipbuilding had a built-in-advantage in that Shipowners had a 100% depreciation allowance in the first year for tax purposes so the extra cost of a British-built vessel vis-a-vis a Japanese-built one was tolerable – until the lower-wage Koreans built giant modern (so more efficient) government-subsidised shipyards; even then Doxford & Sunderland kept going until it was nationalised and thereby ruined. Of course the Cammell Laird decision that said tea ladies have to be paid the “same” (in effect significantly more) per hour as the riveters and welders working outdoors in all weathers did a lot to destroy what was left.
So divide the “gross profit” by the number of workers and you get the average wage.
If Tim suddenly gained power and revoked the 1948 Planning Act and used a Statutory Instrument to wipe out all the subsidiary legislation and Statutory Instruments, then the standard of living affordable for metal-bashers would soar.
Absolutely.
When people talk about “British Manufacturing” today, it’s not sewing socks and regular metal bashing. It’s high skill, it’s custom work, it s a mix of manufacturing and service.
Sting? I’d got the impression that he was enjoying his millions and had kind of just put the lid on being an intergalactic throbber.
And then up he crops, to introduce hisself to a whole new generation.
Perhaps he’s finally bored of shagging Trudi for hour upon hour and seeks new outlets for his, er, energies. I seem to recall rumours of a fling with backing singer Tessa Niles when he was touring in the late 80’s, mind.
I don’t recall Thatcher being particularly concerned about *how* the economy was organized, only to get the union and government parasites out of the way so average people could make money.
‘Service economy’ is, I believe, more a WEF concern.
To get the union and government parasites out of the way she had to destroy the mass-labour industries, including the railways. So she did. If she hadn’t there would probably not have been any kind of 80s economic recovery here.
Mind you she also had plenty of help from globalisation. Ford Transit production moved from Southampton to Turkey, allegedly with EU help.
No, she did not – she sold off chunks of state-owned businesses to people who would run them better. The Chairman of National Power told a meeting that I attended that he was going to have the largest redundancy programme in history because he had three employees for every two jobs. Almost all of the privatised businesses were required to increase prices by a fixed amount less than RPI (so price cuts in real, inflation-adjusted terms)
The High Court decided that the CWU was allowed to strike against the decision by the Conservative government to allow (the then state-owned) Cable & Wireless to compete against BT as it would reduce the number of jobs for its members – the number of jobs created by setting up a whole new network to compete with BT was less than the number of jobs lost when BY decided it had to become a little bit efficient if there was competition!
Secondly, she did not privatise the railways.
Mrs Thatcher’s only economic mistake was to let the £ float up when North Sea Oil gave us a balance-of-payments surplus (Norway got it right).
I thought Julius Caesar had the largest redundancy programme after the civil war with his legionaries getting a small farm each.
Who said these were economic mistakes?
The Blessed Margaret took a bankrupt, sclerotic, near-Soviet country and transformed it into a much freer and more liberal (in the proper meaning of the word) country of opportunity, for those who had get up and go. If she’d left the unionised mass industries and union powers as they were she would have failed, so she did what was necessary to severely restrict the disruptive power of organised labour. It worked.
Those with get up and go go up and went, mostly to the South. Those without stayed put on bennies funded by windfall North Sea taxes and founded sink estates populated by bennies dynasties. Bearpark jumps to mind; you may know it. One of the very few pits still working in that area in the late 70s. Now Geordie Mogadishu.
Arthur Scargill bought a comb.
She did not destroy industries.
That is a lie put about by the likes ofMandelson
“she had to destroy the mass-labour industries, including the railways”
She didn’t do that. She privatised some industries. But a lot of what happened to industry was just about the times. More imports from Europe and Asia. More use of robotics.
What suits Britain is services, invention, design and specialist manufacturing. It’s why I routinely got fucked off during Brexit with people talking about exports of seed potatoes that are a fraction of the revenue of Grand Theft Auto or machinery like JCBs.
When I did my mech eng degree in the early 90s the decline and fall of British ship building was a case study in the management module.
As I recall the point was that management didn’t have a clue. They didn’t need to price a ship to sell it because post war the merchant shipping industry would buy everything. Unions were intransigent, lazy, resistant to change and obsessed with demarcation.
Faced with efficient foreign competition it all fell apart fast.
They still make ships, especially cruise liners, in Finland, Sweden, Germany and Italy, all high wage countries so it can be done.
The decline in British ship building mirrors the decline in the use of the Red Duster.
Shipowners place their ships under flags of convenience and can choose from a very competitive market. They then crew these ships with Indians for the merchantmen and Filipino or Thai ladyboys for the liners. All of whom are treated like slaves.
Italy makes ships using cheap Bangladeshi labour though (“BMWs” – Bangladeshi migrant workers). Some literally as slave labour, allegedly. The Italians have a surprisingly big South Asian population in general, for jobs the locals don’t want to do anymore for the pay available. It’s how they ended up playing in the last T20 Cricket World Cup… https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5njmgmvq7o
It is also how there were incredibly severe Covid outbreaks in Italian cities.
When you look at the latest Royal Navy boats you have to agree that vital shipbuilding skills have indeed been irretrievably lost.