Prestwich_Blue
Well-Known Member
You are right about Germany but the decline of UK manufacturing had been going on for many years, certainly well before Thatcher. I'd recommend a book called "The Audit of War" by Correlli Barnett, Link which tells how our industrial capacity strated its decline in 1945.r.soleofsalford said:Ducado said:You seem to have this romantic view of the heavy manufacturing industry in this country, the fact is most of it went down the pan when it could not compete with countries such as Japan and Korea (at the time) and West Germany, fast forward to today and those countries can not compete with China, and have suffered much higher unemployment.
The Tories made an environment were business could flourish, lower tax, less regulation, reform of the employment legislation, raining in the unions etc, and many businesses did flourish.
Yes at the time it did seem very brutal and unemployment was terrible, however it laid the foundations for a better economic base.
The world is run on a free market basis (on the whole) it would be nice to have ourselves insulated from it, but we would suffer much more. In the end it is the private sector that creates the wealth that governments need to spend on vital services
we all know industry`s come and go, nothing lasts for ever. but as i stated it was the general feeling toward any manufacturing that it was 2nd class and was there to be tolerated. unlike germany before re-unification where engineering industry was revered
Thatcher stopped pouring money in to these industries and it was actually under Labour when the mass closures of the steel industry started due to EU regulations about subsidies.