Ship building boomng in France.

[KristiferColumbus]

From memory, all governments in the 70s were entirely at the mercy of the unions. The Left hate Mrs T precisely because she stood up to the unions. When our engineering and mining industries had finally disintegrated under the weight of their own incompetence, greed and Luddism, banking may have been the only one left......

I started an apprenticeship in aircraft manufacturing in 1970 & already Japanese engineering was starting to pull the rug out from under us in car manufacturing & motor bikes.
I remember an acquaintance bought a 250cc Yamaha & it was light years ahead of British made ones.A 50cc Honda somebody bought ran at 19,000 revs & I was gobsmacked.
Cars the history is well known so in my opinion it must be down to antiquated management & lack of investment in design among other things....you can't blame it all on the Unions.
Up until that point we lead the world in ship building trains aircraft cars motor bikes.We started the nuclear Industry apparently you name it!
So where did all the profits go? Maybe the Unions just recognized that something stank!Certainly we all knew then that you could get far more money & were held in higher regard in Germany as I previously stated.

 

[Twister_Ken]

Cars the history is well known so in my opinion it must be down to antiquated management & lack of investment in design among other things....you can't blame it all on the Unions.

Britain is once again a major car manufacturer. What's changed is management. Now it's Indian, Japanese, German.

 

[Bru]

Britain is once again a major car manufacturer. What's changed is management. Now it's Indian, Japanese, German.

Which is proof to my thinking that the fundamental problems were not with the workforce

 

[Twister_Ken]

Which is proof to my thinking that the fundamental problems were not with the workforce

I'm with you on that.

 

[Sandy]

In January, Brittany Ferries ordered an LNG powered ferry €240m

http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/soci...y-ecologique-geant-pour-brittany-ferries.html

Interesting to hear that BF are having a new ship built. We heard they were really struggling - perhaps as they had taken the Ryanair model of transporting people.

 

[halcyon]

Cars the history is well known so in my opinion it must be down to antiquated management & lack of investment in design among other things....you can't blame it all on the Unions.
Up until that point we lead the world in ship building trains aircraft cars motor bikes.We started the nuclear Industry apparently you name it!
So where did all the profits go? Maybe the Unions just recognized that something stank!Certainly we all knew then that you could get far more money & were held in higher regard in Germany as I previously stated.

I started my apprenticeship in the early 60's, left wing unions / closed shop was a big problem. In 63 BMC completed new £49m production line at Longbridge increasing production to 1 million cars a year, what happens, the first 6 months of 1963 Morris Cowley plant had 134 strikes, between Sept 63 - Sept 64 they had 254 unofficial strikes loosing 750,000 man hours, totally destroying the gain. do a search for Red Robo, lead Longbridge unions and stood as communist candidate at the elections, Cowley unions were run by the Trotskyites, more extreme than Red Robo.

Back then profits were low so not helping self expansion, most firms were private so got hit badly with death duty, Banks even then were not keen to lend money, we started seeing managers who were appointed by their self marketing ability not managerial, we started seeing the growth of graduate engineers who had qualifications not design ability, the politicians started meddling for votes, or political dogma, the media were always negative, we had recessions at the wrong times and lacked political support, it was easy for foreign firms to buy British ones but hard for us to buy such as German, we have a ability to always see the negative in British and the positive in foreign.

In the 60's engineers were reasonably well paid, by the time I gave up in 82 we were the pits. Yet a friend worked at Merc in Germany on design and said 60% of them were British.

Until we stop taking the easy option of, they make it better, cheaper or there image is better than getting of our backsides and doing something we carry on down hill.

Brian

 

[Twister_Ken]

Until we stop taking the easy option of, they make it better, cheaper or there image is better than getting of our backsides and doing something we carry on down hill.

Brian

See my post #22. British car industry ceased going downhill some time ago and is now a major exporter.

"UK factories built 1.46 million cars in 2012, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said, of which 1.21 million were shipped abroad."

Story at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21057798

No doubt a bit of digging could come up with more recent figures.

 

[halcyon]

See my post #22. British car industry ceased going downhill some time ago and is now a major exporter.

"UK factories built 1.46 million cars in 2012, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said, of which 1.21 million were shipped abroad."
]

In 1963 when BMC were close to building 1 million cars a year there were 6,462 m cars on the UK roads, 2012 with the 1.46 m there are over 27,000 m so a smaller %.

But of the 1.46m cars, 1.21 are export leaving 250,000 sold in UK, registration 2012 was 2,045,000, so we imported 1,795,000 cars, against in 1963 BMC were exporting 400,000 cars.

We have car assembly plants employing British workers building cars for foreign owned firms, most of which are for export, not much reward for Britain PLC.

Brian

 

[dom]

Which is proof to my thinking that the fundamental problems were not with the workforce

Many many foreign investors agree with you. Unions and bad 1970s/80s management are now largely regarded as equal and opposite forces -- it's a chicken and egg debate as to which came first. Thankfully that world is now dead and buried and with it a heap of inefficient and uneconomic businesses. This was a positive Darwinian development in that it set British workers on the road to be amongst the most highly regarded and most productive in the world. Nissan and BMW are delighted to have substantial UK operations and many US, European and Chinese firms are currently running their slide rulers over all sorts of successful survivors in the engineering, industrial and railroad space.

Hold on you might say, is UK productivity as a whole not at an all time low? Yes it is, but that's not the fault of hardworking British workers or adventurous foreign entrepreneurs. It is the fault of cretinous policy from successive governments -- first Labour's big government than the Conservatives idiotic cuts to UK fixed capital formation and higher education whilst the economy remained trapped at the zero lower bound of nominal rates. Osborne has stuck to his guns and the IMF, US Treasury and German Government have watched in amazement as cuts to infrastructure spending, high-tech university research, etc leave the UK trailing a country mike behind the Germans and even the French.

I think the British have an expression for this; "Lions led by donkeys!" ...seems about right to me (BTW I'm not British)