Similarly I did not know (or possibly had forgotten) the background to the sale of quota to European boats - it does all, as you say, sound consistent with the actions of successive British governments since the 80’s
While I agree with Geoff that the legacy of the Thatcher years is poor I think Alex has a point - compared with the alternatives Thatcher was the better choice at the time.
The problem is that Thatcher was wrong that “the market will provide” in too many areas where public good should take precedence over private gain - housing is a good example; Thatcher sold off council houses to their tenants which put a bit of money in the public purse but she (or her government) effectively prevented the local councils building more. The result has been too little housing supply for decades because private developers quite like the high prices which are produced as a result of low supply and high demand. Even where legislation says they should build a certain %age of affordable housing this has been ignored or “worked round”.
The result is that no-one can afford to buy because house price inflation has completely outstripped wage inflation and the fact that private landlords charge rents which are more than the mortgage repayments means people cannot save for their deposits (now, of course typically 20% rather than 5% thus adding insult to injury).
As Geoff says it is the lack of investment which is showing its dividends - but I’ll point the finger of blame at Labour here too - Brown did well to provide a superficial boost by plundering the pension funds but, again, did little to improve the underlying infrastructure deficit.
To run with Alex’s analogy it is not so much that we are blaming the surgeon for removing the gangrenous limb but having done so he1 did not arrange a prosthesis, or physio and gave out only one pair of crutches which wore out and now wishes to deflect blame for the fact that the poor patient’s good leg is riddled with arthritis having done the work of two for 40 years.
1] I do not wish to imply by using “he” here that surgeons cannot be female - but surely to eff up so spectacularly, so arrogantly, the odds are that our putative surgeon would have been male with firmly fixed 1970’s attitudes.
I like your extension of the medical analogy Paul - but it’s important not to disguise that this was not just the surgeon’s oversight or negligence: the attack on organised labour, just like that on social housing, or any form of market regulation, were driven by an ideology: since the market always knows best, everything will come right if we just stop interfering with it. Right-wing Tories really believed this.
I guess you know the famous story of Thatcher, in a Tory policy discussion, throwing Hayek’s book down on the table with the words “This is what we believe!”
No serious economist believes it now, of course, but it is still alive and well in Tory circles - and was a major driver of brexit.
I also agree ‘New Labour’ played its part in the dismal history - like all centrists they tinkered rather than fully reversed the direction the UK had taken under Thatcher.
What the UK needed in 1997 was the kind of transformational Labour government it had in 1945 - that gave us the NHS - or in the 60s - that gave us comprehensive education, etc.
Jeremy Corben played a huge part with his dithering in taking the UK out of the EU and he was soundly rejected by the mainstream Labour voters who did not like his southern urban idea of socialism.
It doesn’t really matter whether it comes from the political left, centre or right - what the UK needs now is a government who are not arses, treat the public with some respect and act with basic honesty and integrity as well as having some political vision .
I guess I might agree that the 1945 government was one of the last to have true vision but don’t forget that same 1945 Labour government nationalised key industries - rail, coal which was ultimately disastrous for the country, leading to us being “the poor man of Europe” by the 70’s
You’re going to find it difficult to make the case against state ownership of basic infrastructure here in France, Paul.
Over 55% of the French economy is directly or indirectly state-owned-and-run, and over a further 10% is otherwise socially owned (co-operatives, etc).
Indeed French and other European state or part-state-owned companies now run much of the UK ‘privatised’ infrastructure - EDF (Électricité de France), Orange, SNCF (which runs 7 of the UK’s train operators - indeed almost all UK railways are now run by European state-owned companies!) - etc - etc…
Part of the lesson France needs to take from the UK wrong turn is precisely that a big interventionist state actually works pretty well - or at least better than relatively unregulated markets.
One aspect of this you might be interested in, by the way, is the example of Singapore - doyen of the Tory ‘global Britain’ ideologues. Except that (as Ha Joon Chang’s analysis clearly shows) Singapore is a better advert for a big state than it is for ‘free’ markets: almost all the land in Singapore is owned by the state; 85% of housing is provided by a state-owned agency; 22% of output is from state-owned enterprises.
Equally, I’m not against private enterprise. Indeed, I am a serial entrepreneur, myself, having set up and run many businesses - my first when I was still at school, and second at university, though since my 20s they have all been ‘social enterprises’.
I believe in free enterprise - but within a broadly socialist framework, which pragmatically recognises that different forms of ownership and control are appropriate for different purposes.
I love French trains by the way. Because of my environmentalism I have been a regular user of railways in the UK and here in France - and let me tell you there is absolutely no comparison. The French are better in every single respect: the trains themselves, the technology (investment!), the staff, punctuality - you name it, SNCF does it better!
I wonder if any of the figureheads held up as “responsible” for what we face now are not merely symptoms of a rot that set in many. many generations earlier.
OH used to do an audit for a steel works in Sheffield in the 70s and he saw their handwritten ledgers. NO investment had been put into the business since 1936.
Sadly there has never been much respect for management and engineering skills in the UK. Too much power in the hands of landed gentry maybe?
With the growth of the empire, British goods were shipped out on British ships, insured by British insurers to captive markets. What need was there to be constantly renewing, reinventing, improving? British management grew fat and complacent and continued so for many generations. I still get a small tinge of sadness when I see the beautiful minis running around now. It was my first car in the late 70s and I loved it. Why could British Leyland not do what BMW has done?
I think a full answer to that question would be very long but I suspect that the ultimate reason is “BL could not manage, and the Germans could”. In fact not just the the Germans but the Japanese as well proved that we have a potentially high quality, skilled, workforce if it is incentivised and managed properly.
Sadly I think too many managers in heavy industry in England essentially despised their workforce which is not a good start, and that attitude went (and goes) right through to government who care little for our manufacturing base and understand it less.
Geoff where would your investments have been, in mining, an industry which is now deemed to be unwanted and a major contribution to pollution or maybe the car industry and all the problems of refusing to accept redundancies, change working practices and as in other workplaces the dreaded “chalk line”.
I worked in the warehousing and transport industry and was once offered a job by a major nationalised company. The director who was interviewing me said that if an employee left then the union would tell me who I would employ! End of my interest in the job.
I was the manager of a multinational’s warehousing and distribution facility in Liverpool and that one was tried on me when I first took over, the place operated a closed shop, but I simply suggested “fine, as long as Transport House pays his wages”. End of but typical of Union attitudes at the time.
I agree cultural factors - including the lazy inheritance of slavery and colonialism - were factors in poor management in the UK over generations - but I think it’s important to remember that this was symbiotic with structural factors. In Germany, Sweden, etc - for example - the ‘mitbestimmung’ legal/financial infrastructure of industry ensures close co-operation between management and workforce - and the participation of shop floor workers in strategic management in turn ensures long-term strategic focus - because employees generally want long-term jobs and pensions, whereas shareholders often want quick profitable exits.
Interestingly, the Bullock Report on industrial democracy in the UK - just before Thatcher’s victory - would have (if Labour had been elected and implemented it) introduced something similar in the UK.
See my previous reply Alex - if you want to contest the efficacy of involving employees in management you need to offer an explanation for the fact that both companies and countries with higher levels of staff participation actually in general do better.
Paternalistic attitudes of management in the UK ( Ie a “landed gentry” view of above and below stairs) maybe? Even the lauded approach of the Quakers? So staff /employees were not to be considered as equals and hence not brought into management structures but to be told what to do. And perhaps out of that came the anger of the unions.
The service may be excellent but it’s at a huge cost. The accumulated debt of SNCF currently stands at about €38 billion and would have been even more than that if the Government hadn’t written off €35 billion last year.
As a business, it’s a disaster!
But is it?
This was discussed in another thread here on Survive France. SNCF is a huge multinational group - and It’s not uncommon nowadays for these to be hugely leveraged (though sometimes ‘off-balance-sheet’). SNCF’s debt was not, as I recall, dissimilar to many private sector multinationals in relation to its turnover; almost all huge multinationals are ‘subsidised’ by governments in some way, and some huge multinationals - Uber springs to mind - haven’t ever actually made any profit!
(Incidentally - Le Monde is one of the French companies that is part-staff-owned. This is not uncommon in the French newspaper industry - famously in Le Canard enchaîné - which I think is all the better for it.)
Fascinating comment Sue - I’ve been thinking about it, and looked up my notes on Deborah Cadbury’s book The Chocolate Wars.
The Quakers were an absolute dynamo of nineteenth century British entrepreneurialism - in part because they were excluded from most middle-class professions (the army, the church, etc) - but to no small degree their success depended precisely on their sense of social service and responsibility. All the great names in English chocolate – Frys, Terrys, Cadburys and Rowntrees - were Quakers. George Cadbury once worked for John Rowntree! But many other UK household names were also founded by Quakers - Barclays and Lloyds in banking, Clarks shoes, Wedgwood pottery, Bryant & May, Huntley & Palmer – not to mention (bizarrely) Sony and Oxfam! The extent of employee participation in ownership and management varied - in some, such as Scott Bader, it was (and remains) 100% - but most originally followed comparatively ethical principles and practices.
When the Cadbury brothers Richard and George found that the little chocolate drink business they inherited from their father in Birmingham in 1861 was losing money, they used up their inheritances to keep the company afloat - ‘they survived on bread and butter suppers’ – yet still provided excursions, education, clubs and improved wages for their employees. Eventually the business prospered – until it was infamously taken over by the huge multinational Kraft.
Deborah Cadbury makes the point that this change reflected a wider change in the ownership structures of UK capitalism – that since the Thatcher stock market ‘big bang’ etc Cadbury shares had insidiously passed into the hands of city fund managers only really interested in quick financial gains - a 186 year old business built on altruism (she believed) via the amorality of modern financial markets, swallowed up by the globalised corporate world.
They were excluded because they would not swear an oath of allegiance to the Monarch which was necessary for admittance to University at the time.
Oath swearing is forbidden to Quakers, their word should be enough.
I never said I was against employee involvement in management but working for a multinational and working occasionally in such diverse places as Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Denmark and Italy I didn’t spot much employee influence on major management decisions there. I often wonder how close the old ditty “The working class can kiss my ass, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last” was to the truth!
Had the Unions got their way, or should I say the most extremist but unfortunately powerful ones, then the country would probably have gone the way of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
However, I also admit to seeing a lot of deadbeats in senior management positions due to old school tie, friendships and wealth. So you had the extreme situation of the old joke, “What’s the difference between Terry Wogan and the Board of RBS?” Answer, Wogan had a Banking qualification, not one of the Board had!
