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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

• ggm 1y ago
  The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now. Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. If you don't regard this as a core competency which should be kept in the national register, then sure, buy the ships from other places. But, don't come whining when the national-strategic interest needs you to do things outside the commercial domain or under duress, or with restrictions of access to supply in those other places. There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency. I might add that Australia is in pretty much the same boat (hah) and the shemozzle over the Tasmanian Ferries (ordered from Scandi, parked in Edinburgh because too big for their home port dockside tie-ups) is an exemplar. And there's a high speed double-hull "cat" style fabricator in Tassie, or at least there was. In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise. I sailed around Falmouth 30 years ago with a friend and indeed, a lot of big ships were laid up in the estuary and river mouth. Awesome sight in a small sailing boat.
  • jacquesm 1y ago
    For a country that is an Island you'd think that the question of whether or not it is 'national-strategic' would have been answered in the affirmative.
    • mrcsharp 1y ago
      It is. But you won't get such an answer from the "important" people because they are busy imposing useless laws every other day. The public is unaware and unwilling to engage in such discussions because there isn't much pain being felt yet from the current structure of the economy.
      • givemeethekeys 1y ago
        If the people who have the most to lose don't think that something is in the national interest, then is it really?
        • xboxnolifes 1y ago
          They're also the people with the most ability to jump ship should something happen.
          • coldtea 1y ago
            aka zero skin in the game, and, worse, a lot to earn by doing favors and pushing for quick profits for their friends in the corporate and finance worlds
            • potato3732842 1y ago
              It's the old world old money version of cashing out your tech bucks and retiring to Colorado.
        • mrcsharp 1y ago
          Disagreements about what is of national interest is always going to be a thing. In my opinion, having a country that doesn't have the means to build, at the very least, what is needed to keep its economy going is not in a good spot at all.
        • faichai 1y ago
          "think" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Are the people really thinking? I don't think they are.
          • coldtea 1y ago
            Those people are thinking just fine. With their wallets. Why would they prioritize national interests? Because they were elected to do so? After all they know they were actually elected because people were only given a couple of establishment approved choices, and in their naivety they happened to pick their side this time (after all they alternate between the two choices all the time). They also know they'll be fine and have their salaries, extras, and nice corporate post-politic sinecures whetever their performance. Just see Blair.
    • calvinmorrison 1y ago
      For an Island that has been dependent importing most goods for hundreds of years... I don't even think there's much of a merchant marine fleet left in the UK.
      • arlcode 1y ago
        Interesting question. Its plausible that there are not many vessels that are UK flagged anymore. The more interesting question is how many of these are under "control"/influence of domestic operators If required, a flag can be exchanged in a pinch and tax codes /regulations can be adapted to allow/encourage this.
        • noir_lord 1y ago
          Happened during the Falklands War. There are peacetime rules and war time rules, war time rules are best summarised as “government does what it wants and justifies it after the fact”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:_British_naval_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:... under “Ships taken from trade”.
          • realityking 1y ago
            I just clicked through to some of the listed ships and it appears they were all flying a British flag in 1982 before being requisitioned. It’s not at all clear to me a government would have that power about a foreign flagged vessel, even if the shipping line owning it might be British.
            • RobotToaster 1y ago
              Maybe not legally, but most of the countries used as a flag of convenience are tiny, what could the Marshall islands do about it?
      • dukeyukey 1y ago
        It's about a thousand ships, but realsitically it's very fuzzy, with flags of convenaince and all. And British companies own a _lot_ of ships, just flagged under other countries.
    • eru 1y ago
      Why? Singapore is an island, too, and we don't need a national-strategic ship building industry. As long as your friends build ships, you are fine. The UK is friends with South Korea, for example.
      • ggm 1y ago
        South Korea is a long way away, if supply chains are contested and there are competing bidders for their outputs. South Korea is far closer to Singapore. "Friends" is a strange concept in national strategic planning. You might ask yourself "just how much are those friends going to come and help when push comes to shove" and look at current politics, and re-assess what has been commonly felt these last 50 years: no prior friend can be assumed to be motivated to still be a friend. Think about Taiwan. All these friends, and now the biggest one says "we think you're too risky. move all that advanced chip making to us, onshore, we'll talk more about how seriously we want to be a friend and defend you after"
        • eru 1y ago
          There's always trade-offs. Even local shipping producers can't magic together a ship in a week. Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends. My main point is that close allies (both geographically and in terms of relationship) are about as good as having your own local industry. In a few important cases and areas, having production with friends is better than at home. Mostly because it's harder for local political interests to capture a foreign economy.
          • deleted 1y ago
            [deleted]
          • dylan604 1y ago
            > Of course, you can also look for some closer-to-home backup friends. Nobody likes being a back up friend to only be called on when your primary friend is unavailable, or you want to do something your primary friend wouldn't like. Countries make treaties/trade agreements accordingly
    • agobineau 1y ago
      australia has almost no fuel refining capacity most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore. in the XXIer century some australia cities have run out of gasoline for half a day, an afternoon, a few days https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-tanker-delayed-again-in-tasmania/6621740 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-15/singapore-bound-duel-...
      • oblio 1y ago
        > XXIer century Sorry, but it's a bit funny. Based on the name I assume you're French (speaking, at least)? That "XXIer" contraption is really funny to me, I speak a bit of French. In English it's twenty first so XXI or XXIst, in French as far I know it's vingt et unième, so XXI or XXIème. Is "XXIer" from another French dialect or another language entirely?
        • femtozer 1y ago
          As a french person, it looks weird to me. I would only use it for the very first century: Ier siècle.
        • fmajid 1y ago
          Probably German (Zwanzig Erster)
          • oblio 1y ago
            See, that's the problem with (my) assumptions :-D
      • bgnn 1y ago
        That's unbelievable. A lot of 3rd world countries have their own refineries.. Wow.
      • throwaway290 1y ago
        > most of australia has less than 2 weeks of gasoline and imports it on weekly barges from singapore. And you know how much oil is found in the vast lands of Singapore... That stuff floating to Australia is probably Russian oil https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/nov/09/loophole-russian-sanctions-oil-imported-to-australia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/nov/09/looph...
    • michaelt 1y ago
      If shipbuilding is a strategic national industry, doesn't that also make all the inputs to a shipyard strategic industries? After all, if a war broke out and our normal trading partners weren't willing to sell us ships, presumably they wouldn't sell us steel or engines or ball bearings or paint or radar modules or computer chips or plastics.
      • moomin 1y ago
        They is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, unless you believe we buy steel from the same places we buy ships. The real answer to this is threat analysis: what are the realistic scenarios under which it becomes a problem. e.g. if Japan stops supplying ships a) how likely is that and b) could we just buy them from the Dutch instead? However, the stakes for getting this wrong are high.
        • lukan 1y ago
          I mean, if we are talking about a big war scenario, then simply the distance to Japan would mean Dutch ships are clearly the better choice. Otherwise sure, realistic threat scenarios. But the world is also changing fast. Denmark or Canada did not expected to be militarily threatened by the US some years ago and still this is where we are now.
        • nico_h 1y ago
          If it’s sourced from abroad it has to be shipped (blockades anyone ?) If your usual trading partner is inaccessible for reason X , what are the odds your alternate trading partner is also affected by reason X? Are there geopolitical or national political reasons that partner B might become unavailable or unpalatable at the same time?
          • energy123 1y ago
            Maybe, but it has to be balanced against the economic damage of autarkic policies which sabotages national security in its own way. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis.
        • 1y ago
    • expedition32 1y ago
      It's a country that is also a capitalist economy. Ofcourse they can build cargo ships. But those ships will be ten times more expensive than anything you can buy from Korea. Who is going to make up the difference?
      • flir 1y ago
        The idea is that, if it's that important, you ultimately fund it from taxation. It's so important that it's really defence spending.
        • TitaRusell 1y ago
          The UK has been slashing defence spending since WW2. And with reason the USSR lost because they couldn't afford the cold war anymore.
          • nradov 1y ago
            And now the UK has committed to increase defense spending. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8175/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
    • mr_toad 1y ago
      The decisive battle of WWII, as far as the defence of Britain was concerned, was fought in the air. Invading an island nation without air superiority is a non-starter. I actually doubt the value of modern navies for anything other than gunboat diplomacy, or coastal patrols these days. I think they’re too vulnerable to things like cruise missiles and drones.
  • jay_kyburz 1y ago
    Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies, as a national priority. If this means building cars, ships, tanks, and planes, then that infrastructure should be built and maintained at taxpayers expense. Whats more, you need to have market forces within your own country so competition can deliver you the best products. You can't just fund one ship building company, you need to roll the dice on a handful. Every now and then you have to prune back the organizations that are not working, and give a shot to startups to see if they can do better. If you can't tell, I believe in big, transparent, government.
    • eru 1y ago
      Who are you to decide these priorities for other people? Don't we have democracy, so that people can make their own choices?
      • jay_kyburz 1y ago
        Yeah, whenever I post a comment you can just prepend "In my humble opinion.." Perhaps more interestingly, as a younger person, I felt very differently. I used to think that military spending was very wasteful. I was ashamed of our countries involvement in the invasion of other countries without UN approval. I had assumed the world was more civilized and peaceful that it was before nukes. We have free trade all over the world now! Our governments seemed to be actively dismantling manufacturing - the information economy was the future for us. Now the world descends into chaos, and it will be very slow and expensive to restart those heavy industries. But actually, I don't really know how expensive it will be to get things started again. Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones.
        • protocolture 1y ago
          >Perhaps we can skip tanks and planes and jump right to weaponized satellites and autonomous drones. I saw a whitepaper that suggested Australia should give up shipbuilding in exchange for drones and electronic warfare. The goal being to present a front like Ukraine does. Bristle with weapons and guarantee that any invasion would be 10 times more costly than anything gained. It was interesting at least.
  • hypeatei 1y ago
    I'm of the opinion that things like shipbuilding don't really matter in times of war for countries with nuclear weapons. There would be dire consequences for anyone invading and/or blockading a nuclear armed country. A lot of people seem to yearn for the "good old days" where we built giant, tangible things that did cool stuff. That's fine, but the "national security" arguments ring hollow as you're basically saying all institutions, intelligence agencies, defense agencies, etc. are asleep at the wheel if it truly is a threat... which I guess is possible but highly unlikely.
    • ggm 1y ago
      You seem to think nuclear weapons stop all forms of tension short of nuclear war but the evidence is strong that even nuclear armed parties do things which don't include nuclear weapons. India applies strategic pressures to it's neighbours including ones with nuclear weapons. They're bashing each other with sticks and stones on the border, to avoid pulling nuclear triggers. There was an ad-blue shortage in Australia last year, we have no onshore refinery and got close to running out. The nearest one is Indonesia and we were in a number of trade disputes regarding lumpy skin diseases and cattle and sheep. It only takes one or two sore points for something like "sorry, we sold your ad-blue to somebody else" and the entire mining sector is shut down. British strategic military thinking assumed its role in NATO was unchanging. The re-appraisal post Ukraine has been significant and I am sure it includes waking up the arms manufacturing sector, and the input side to that is heavy metals industry, which has unfortunately fallen in a hole because of under-capitalisation and world pricing and Gupta and the like now "own" the national steel plan to some extent. You would think that kind of thing would have been thought about. Just making trains onshore instead of buying them in from overseas would have possibly demanded continual metals manufacturing and processing capacity, which kept furnaces alight and steel making to the fore.
      • arcanemachiner 1y ago
        For anyone else wondering, "ad-blue" is another term for DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), which is a chemical used to decrease emissions from diesel engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust_fluid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust_fluid
  • Barrin92 1y ago
    >Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency. The biggest problem with this thinking is that nationally mandated production is fundamentally unable to reduce dependency because national economic policy cannot increase aggregate output. That's to say when you politically prioritize to build ships the question always is what you aren't building instead, because all allocation consists of trade-offs. Britain does not have a gigantic army of reserve labour to deploy that's doing nothing. It's a relatively small country compared to its competitors (as is Australia), it has limited capital. To recuperate the costs of a large industry in particular you need to be internationally competitive to export at scale. Is that even achievable and worth it at the cost of any other place you could put that capital? It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. Free trade is good because it gets you more stuff, autarky does not necessarily diminish your dependence because you're necessarily getting less. North Korea is very autark and still dependent because it's also poor.
    • imtringued 1y ago
      >It's actually worrying me quite a bit that people seem to have completely forgotten what a comparative advantage is. A comparative advantage is a past fixed cost investment whose output has not been consumed in its entirety. Hence comparative advantages are created outcomes and not something you can follow. The reason why a competing nation doesn't build their own industry is that they would have to duplicate the fixed costs of initially starting the industry and it is cheaper to pay only for the ships you need. If the government made the investment anyway, it would now have given its economic potential a concrete form and switching to a different form is expensive. Producing a different commodity requires paying fixed costs again. hnwnce, after the investment there is a comparative advantage to produce commodities whose fixed costs are already paid for. They are literally cheaper to produce than other commodities. Meanwhile if you were to go to the other extreme. What if there was an activity without any fixed costs? The concept of comparative advantage would be meaningless, because switching tasks costs nothing.
    • Yokolos 1y ago
      It's worrying to me that the idea of comparative advantage has become such common parlance among non-economists that it's being used to justify everything without any real analysis or justification. It's not a solution for everything and it's not always applicable or relevant. Free trade is good, sure, but that's not the discussion here. It's not about free trade vs no free trade. Nobody posed that question here, so why are you bringing it up as if it's relevant?
  • protocolture 1y ago
    Australias Unofficial naval strategy is "bomb the shit out of scary boats with Growlers". Australias Official naval strategy is "We need more boats for reasons (cough asylum seekers cough), definitely not because it is politically expedient to keep boat builders employed"
    • dingaling 1y ago
      Well I doubt they'd be using Growlers, but even if they needed to they cost too much ( $80 million a piece ) to be thrown into modern naval air defences, and don't have the range to be deployed where they could actually reach ships causing trouble.
    • rswail 1y ago
      Australia's naval strategy is to defend our sea lanes that we rely on for trade, primarily our trade with our largest customer, which is China. Conveniently, they need what we have, and we want what they make. On the other hand, the primary strategic threat is apparently also China. https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=9n6fTPusYI9jcUhj https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=9n6fTPusYI9jcUhj
  • madaxe_again 1y ago
    I just don’t know that it’s feasible. As the article mentions, the U.K. shipbuilding industry was dependent on cheap, skilled labour. It doesn’t touch upon just how cheap. My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50. The other thing that the article elides is just how much that workforce was shattered by the wars - an awful lot of Glaswegian and other shipbuilders signed up for the navy, as it was a much better opportunity than just making the boats - and proceeded to die at sea in droves. Their families did not receive compensation or their pay more often than not, as it was considered to be bad for morale to say a ship had been lost, and instead all aboard would be classed as missing or as deserters, and when they did finally say “yes, this ship was lost” 15 years after each war, it was usually far too late to be of any use. Anyway. I just can’t see the working classes or international human rights organisations being willing to do the same again.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      >My ancestors were riveters and boiler fitters in Glasgow from about the 1860s to the 1920s - they lived 30 to a room in tenements, three generations atop on another, and had to start work aged 5 or 6 to prevent the family from falling into destitution. The economics essentially demanded that you crank out descendants, as only by pooling a number of incomes could you survive. Everybody had horrific injuries of one variety or another. Most died before reaching 50. So basically the same situation as the prior generations of peasants toiling away to pay their taxes to the lord.
      • madaxe_again 1y ago
        Actually, much, much worse. Before Glasgow, my family were crofters in the highlands - and by all accounts had a pretty good laird - but then the clearances happened, and everyone was condemned to the dark, satanic mills.
  • coldtea 1y ago
    >The best time to try and fix this is 20 or 30 years ago, but absent a time machine, the next best time is now. Sometimes the time to fix a thing in general (nevermind the "best time") has come and gone, and the rest is wishful thinking and platitudes like "the next best time is now".
    • sachahjkl 1y ago
      yeah, you're right, better to sit on your hands and just sit it out idly
      • coldtea 1y ago
        yeah, you're right, best to be delusional that you can fix something when you can't, instead of realistically evaluating your actual situation and finding a pragmatic solution see how such dismissal can cut both ways?
    • MrsPeaches 1y ago
      The UK is actually doing something(ish) about it now. Innovate UK (the UK’s public innovation funding) recently had a bid out for maritime R&D but with a focus on clean tech: https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/opportunities/clean-maritime-demonstration-competition/ https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/opportunities/clean-mari... Obviously, this is not going to make up for the loss of the broader ship building industry, but it does show that the UK is thinking about maritime technology as a key strategic area.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        In my most cynical moments I think if the UK actually wants to build ships the best thing to do might be to close down the existing shipbuilding industry first, and start a newer more efficient one from scratch. Per Ferguson Marine, do you want to prop up a dying industry or achieve usable ships? What's the actual priority?
      • dgroshev 1y ago
        To add to that, we just won a £10bn contract to build Type 26 anti-sub frigates for Norway https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5rgdpvn63o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr5rgdpvn63o
  • pjc50 1y ago
    If you're going to talk about Edinburgh (I could almost see the Tasman ferry from my house), may I introduce you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco "Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million" The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget. How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"? > In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.
    • cassepipe 1y ago
      I have no real opinion on this debate but wouldn't the person you are responding to say that the explosion of budget and lengthening of timeline is exactly because those capacities had been abandoned ? But I agree it's a good question, how much inefficiency can you accept to revive a branch of industry, how long do you have to wait before you decide to throw the towel ?
    • deadbunny 1y ago
      This is the problem with destroying industries then trying to keep small remaining pockets of it/restarting it. You lose all of the institutional knowledge, the stuff that isn't written down, the stuff that comes from experience. This is only exacerbated when those projects you're trying to do become massively over budget and late. People decry it as a waste and a failure, leading to any hard won knowledge being lost yet again as those projects gets scrapped and all the people making it lose their jobs. You don't get good making things if you only try once every 30 years, you get better by continually doing that thing, passing the hard won knowledge down through the workforce by training incoming people not from hiring "experts" and expecting everyone to be up to speed on project #1 immediately.
      • 1y ago
  • scott_w 1y ago
    > Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. So the simple truth is you can almost never "ignore the cost" because that cost must be borne somewhere. And there's always someone that's considered "national-strategic" by someone. Hell, I recall my dad being enraged that our "blue" passports are now manufactured in Poland under contract from a French company. What actually happened is De La Rue took the piss on their contract bid thinking they would just rinse the taxpayer. Having the taxpayer there to bail out a failing shipyard blunts the incentive to modernise which, as we can see from the article, was barely there to begin with. Should the taxpayer sit there with effectively unlimited liability to build these ships? Should that come at the expense of, say, funding for the NHS? Housebuilding? Fixing our crumbling prison system? Modernising our water infrastructure?
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      Society can't ignore the cost. But the bad faith peddlers of the costs sure can. You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation, some additional labor overhead, some procedural change, some tweak of input sourcing or other reduction of outputs relative to inputs as being "amortized" over the course of whatever to much applause from the comment section. And yet these same people are smart enough to recognize these sorts of dishonest "the solution to pollution is dilution" type arguments when applied in other contexts. It ought to make you wonder how much malice is sailing under the flag of ignorance.
      • scott_w 1y ago
        > You can't go an hour without some HN comment just hand waving away the costs of some regulation I don't see what regulation has to do with (effectively) nationalising the entire shipbuilding industry. When I say "cost" I literally mean the financial cost to the Exchequer.
        • potato3732842 1y ago
          Regulation was just one example. Could be any sort of TPS report or other overhead type crap.
  • fmajid 1y ago
    The UK imports half its food, and was almost starved into submission by Nazi U-boats during WW2,, so you’d think they would know this, but laissez-faire ideology is strong in the ruling class.
    • tekla 1y ago
      The UK was never even near starvation levels during WW2. Bread, Vegetables and Fish were never even rationed.
    • tim333 1y ago
      We import a lot by value but less so by calories. We could probably get by on domestic bread and potatoes if blockaded but the oranges, bananas and tuna fish would be in short supply.
  • graemep 1y ago
    > Either you feel this kind of construction process is national-strategic and you ignore the cost over imports, or not. The UK does not even make any effort. Look at the level of dependency on US cloud providers to deliver basic government services. To be fair, the UK is no worse than the rest of Europe (some small gestures and exceptions aside) in this, but that only makes the overall situation worse. Successive British governments have not really thought this through, and what dependencies are a problem. Again, not the only country that has done that, but, again, that does not help solve the problem. > There is Autarky, and there is total dependency, and there is a massive road in-between. Right now, we're very far from Autarky and we're far too close to total dependency. Absolutely, but people are not aware of it, politicians do not care, the the ruling class are declinist.
  • flir 1y ago
    You've got to go up the chain - protect steelmaking, too. And ultimately, where does the iron ore come from? Not saying you're wrong (idk either way), saying that to do it right is a big pivot.
    • lb1lf 1y ago
      That is a fair point, but do keep in mind that the lower in the stack you come, the more options for sourcing you (generally) have. Say, those fancy chips going into the ship's targeting radar may all be designed in a country or two, fabbed in Taiwan using Dutch equipment, whereas the steel you construct the hull with can come from anywhere - at my employer we mostly bought steel from Eastern Ukraine until a couple of years ago; after a brief hiccup we now get it from Turkey and Brazil, mostly - but China, South Korea, Germany or India, for instance, can supply it, too.
  • loglog 1y ago
    1. The article states "In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all." It does not consider military ship building, which still exists in the UK. 2. Given the scale of problems described in the article, it is probably easier to restart a civilian ship building industry from scratch than to expand it from the previously existing.
• vatsachak 1y ago
  "As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive." This feels like the US with longshoremen and coal
  • Incipient 1y ago
    I do feel the cost of labour is DRASTICALLY understated. Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them. My last job, in oil and gas, on a large offshore vessel had I think 4000 people engaged in the shipyard during construction.
    • vatsachak 1y ago
      Even then, living costs in the US are quite bloated due to over-regulation Labor in the US is extremely pricey because you have to keep the landlords happy
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • blitzar 1y ago
      The cost of labour is DRASTICALLY overstated (except when it comes to executive pay then its apparently good value for money?), and the push/obsession with supernormal profits is DRASTICALLY understated.
    • EdwardDiego 1y ago
      > Even today, Asian shipyards have people crawling all over them. When you don't have a minimum wage, or your minimum wage is vastly lower than other competitors, it's far more efficient to hire more people than to invest in process improvements.
• yanhangyhy 1y ago
  This is called mean reversion in history. The UK and Japan are small island countries. They lack the resources and manpower to sustain long-term industrial prosperity. Everything they have is temporary. In the end these industries flow to large nations with vast resources and large pools of technical talent. It used to be the United States. Now it is China absorbing Japan and Korea. This applies not only to shipbuilding but also to automobiles and all precision industries.
  • webdevver 1y ago
    ive long held this take aswell. a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!" but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence. how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? on virtually every objective metric, it is off by an order of magnitude. frankly it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
    • gerdesj 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • webdevver 1y ago
        holy cope
      • r_lee 1y ago
        Here's your trophy, Sir. Indeed China is irrelevant, you are so right!
        • gerdesj 1y ago
          Thank you. I'd like to thank my comrades, mother and all those who believed in me all these years ...
• mike_hearn 1y ago
  It's a good analysis but probably over-fixates on shipping specific factors. The UK also lost its car industry, its steel industry etc. The root cause in most industries is the same, there were just too many Labour supporters and the unions got too strong as a result. From the comments: > I can relate to British union rules being head-bangingly stupid. In the mid-1970's I worked on the night shift as a spot-welder on the production line at the British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Oxford. By the book, only members of the electrician's union were allowed to touch the light switches, so when there was a "work-to-rule" the electricians would would decline to flip the lights on for the night shift—and so there was no night shift. Needless to say, BL went belly-up and now BMW is producing Minis there (although they are no longer very mini). I grew up in the UK and it felt like everyone of my parent's generation had stories like that. My father was in management and had to go toe-to-toe with a union that was on the verge of wiping out his industry (private sector TV), they were doing things like shutting down transmissions as part of demanding higher wages. In that specific case the unions failed as the TV companies were able to automate the transmission suites and then fired all the workers, this was in the 1980s I think when the legal environment was more conducive to that. Funny story: one of the fired workers moved to the US and ended up writing a popular series of thriller books that ended up being turned into a movie series, he became very rich in the process. So the union failing ended up being good for that guy in the end. But in many industries they weren't able to beat the unions thanks to a series of very weak left wing governments in the 50s, 60s and 70s (even the Conservatives were weak on labour until Thatcher) that largely made opposing the unions illegal. So the industries just got wiped out one by one. Today the same problem exists but with Net Zero instead of unions, it makes electricity so expensive that industry becomes uncompetitive vs parts of the world where they don't care, and the political class is fine with this outcome. Decades and decades of governments that cheered on deindustrialization for left wing ideological reasons. So whilst the shipping industry probably did have problems in management (just like the car/steel industry), ultimately having good management wouldn't have helped. What determined if an industry survived this period or not was whether the management was able to automate fast and completely enough to break union power.
  • golemiprague 1y ago
    [dead]
• discarded1023 1y ago
  A fantastic long read on this issue from a Glaswegian perspective (2022): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-steel https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-ste...
• Arubis 1y ago
  Some was lost. Some was freely given; Thatcher was no fan of shipbuilders.
• colesantiago 1y ago
  If we zoom out a bit the UK is a failed country. All the industries in the UK are on the decline and most UK companies are being either sold off, shut down or are being owned (for a long time) by foreign companies. It may take several decades for the UK to come back from this.
  • sefrost 1y ago
    The economic situation in the UK has become bizarre. I would recommend interested HNers to read up on the State Pension Triple Lock; and the various income tax cliff edges as some key examples. With respect to the income tax, it is possible for higher earning (not by US standards) employees to receive a bonus and actually take home less money than before they received the bonus. The triple lock is a politically motivated policy which always grows the state pension (given to essentially all UK citizens and anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years) at a rate faster than earnings grow or faster than the economy grows. It will subsume the entire government budget. Given the extremely high cost of energy, and housing in many places, younger people also seem to be opting out entirely. Disability payments the government pays are increasing at a rapid rate. (1 in 13 of the population are currently receiving this benefit).
    • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
      >anybody that ever worked there for more than 3 years To be fair what you get is proportional. If you are an NI payer for 4 years then you only get 4/32 of the state pension. Having said that the triple lock is a ridiculous idea. The trouble is people are loss averse so it is really hard to take away things people have got used to.
      • Integer 1y ago
        A minimum amount of 10 years is needed to get the basic pension (which is proportional to years worked), but years on Universal Credit (benefits) count towards this. Also, anyone who is of pension age is entitled to a Pension Credit top-up to a weekly income of £227.10.
• dboreham 1y ago
  Meanwhile the UK did give us the web and the CPUs we all use.
• wagwang 1y ago
  Can't wait for the battle of the Thames river between the British North Sea fleet (purchased from China) against the imperial Russian fleet (also purchased from China) On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
  • nextworddev 1y ago
    Good thing that Japanese and South Korean shipbuilding industries exist
  • protocolture 1y ago
    As long as the British people suffer, who am I to judge who built the boats.
  • amelius 1y ago
    You only need a small naval drone to down an entire ship.
  • petepete 1y ago
    Hopefully the Russians don't try and destroy the fishermen of Hull again. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident
  • discomrobertul8 1y ago
    They'll all sink when they crash in to the dumped Lime bike reef (purchased from China)
• dluan 1y ago
  I love how the capitalist laws of markets that instigated the rise of China as a the main ship builder - cheaper labor, automated production, low cost of all the source materials also coming from China - don't seem to apply for the people making the argument of protectional national strategic industries. This is no different than any other industry. Unless you are on the cutting edge of a product where innovation is still being pushed, then your industry is going to be eaten up by China. The UK at its peak was producing 1.4M in ship tonnage, now it produces zero. The US currently produces 69k in ship tonnage. China produces 37M in ship tonnage. Even if you can scale back to the historic peak, it's nowhere near enough. The difference between zero produced ships a year and 3 per year or 30 per year may as well be zero when China is producing 3 per day. It's over.
  • busterarm 1y ago
    Labor cost is like 1% of shipbuilding cost. Also China just followed Japan's playbook, who did it first after WWII. It's entirely about the financing model and heavy cooperation between the State, Banks and Shipbuilders.
• fuoqi 1y ago
  See this video on the economics of shipbuilding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo Assembly of civilian merchant ships is a notoriously low-margin industry (as opposed to manufacturing of engines/propellers/control systems). You could heavily subsidize it (by protectionism measures and/or by juicing up your Navy) like the US does in the name of strategic importance, but be prepared to pay heavily for it. If you want to preserve shipbuilding capabilities for military reasons, then chasing after the Asian shipbuilding countries may not be the most efficient way of achieving this, i.e. it may be better to just invest into building of military ships and manufacturing of higher-margin components without bothering with the low-margin assembly stuff.
  • rester324 1y ago
    Great video. I came across it a few weeks ago and I was surprised how much the financing from the Asian governments mattered in shaping the industry
• mmooss 1y ago
  There's a presumption that it would be beneficial to return mid-20th century manufacturing economies. If you look at economic output and productivity, and quality of life for labor (physical labor, especially repetitive physical labor, is hard to do for decades), we want to move forward and we did. We want to plan for a mid-21st century economy. The problem is a small group seizing the benefits for themselves.
  • goodluckchuck 1y ago
    It’s easy for a small group to seize the benefits when productivity is centralized in the hands of a small group. If you diversify the ability to build boats, then you may not be rich, but you’ll have a boat.
    • mmooss 1y ago
      The increase in wealth concentration mostly happened after ship-building (and other manufacturing) departed.
  • rhubarbtree 1y ago
    Unfortunately, neoliberal bullshit only works out the long term in a political fantasy world.
    • mmooss 1y ago
      The impression is that you must know nothing about the merits and this is all you have - name-calling, swearing, condescension. But most of that is unnecessary and definitely inappropriate to HN: What makes you think you can treat people this way? Because they have economic ideas you don't like - and, it seems, don't understand?
      • rhubarbtree 1y ago
        I don’t think I insulted anyone, I said neoliberal ideas are bullshit. Because they’re demonstrably so. In the UK, Thatcherism resulted in terrible decision after terrible decision, and we must all live with the consequences.
• kleiba 1y ago
  When you source out part of your production to a friendly nation, it's a cooperation. If you source it out to a non-friendly nation, this dependence is a liability.
• Havoc 1y ago
  Near everyone lost their shipping industry.
• thorin 1y ago
  Same reason it got out of every other industry. It wasn't short-term profitable. After the 70s at least everything began moving to the private sector and there was no strategic thinking. This completed in the 90s and there was no reason for anyone to think that semi-conductors, minerals, even oil and gas now shouldn't be bought from a friend rather than being produced internally.
  • boomskats 1y ago
    You mean a friend with a lobbying budget and a revolving door?
  • lm28469 1y ago
    It's almost as if Europe entirely gave up sometime in the 70s. People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years because they know they'll bounce to another position. That's why everything is seemingly slowly crumbling away (healthcare, industries, culture, education), we're putting bandaids here and there to maintain the illusion but I think everyone can tell the general trend
    • inglor_cz 1y ago
      " People used to have vision for the next 50+ years, now they care about the next 3-5 years " This sounds like a modern version of Golden Age nostalgia. First, I am not at all sure that people had longer visions; some probably did, but the entire nations? Not so sure. Second, there is a certain wisdom in accepting that you don't know how the world will look in 50+ years. 50 years ago, China was an extremely impoverished country that no one would take seriously as a competitor for global influence, Iran was US-friendly and the USSR was on the peak of its power.
      • dijit 1y ago
        It's not really nostalgia, when 95% of infrastructure was constructed in the 70's and not maintained (something you see a lot in the UK outside of the south-east) you can feel this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus
• KingTravis 1y ago
  I feel this explains our "productivity puzzle" quite well - A lack of infrastructure and R&D investment that is holding the UK back and really needs to be fixed.
• KingTravis 1y ago
  I've struggled to understand exactly why our productivity is so bad here and I feel that this really explains it quite well - over reliance in tried and tested methods coupled with a lack of capital investment - for example relying on push-carts in the yards rather than looking at whatever was a more automated approach. It's not necessarily a case of a "productivity puzzle" but rather a puzzle as to why business owners aren't investing. I got talking to a guy in the pub who told me about a local tire business, running completely on paper and manpower. In 2025 there's barely a hint of computers in the business. Seems like a similar story really. They could be making more sales, be more efficient, still employ people but redeploy to more useful roles. But no, a prevailing attitude of just carry on with pen and paper, and the MD can buy himself a flash new motor every year. When asked why the don't use technology it was like a fear of it, that they would be made redundant. I don't even mean AI, I mean even like a simple messaging system to IM from one side of the warehouse to another. Mental.
  • exasperaited 1y ago
    If you perceive your work to be artisanship (and a lot of people in the automotive and custom bicycle business do, along with people in the high end furniture business, for example), and you have enough customers who agree, and enough work to keep yourself and your employees busy and your families all fed, then a messaging system that speeds up productivity really is a lot of bollocks, basically (particularly for a company which is, in my experience of these amazing people, still disproportionately likely to hire people with dyslexia or reading difficulties). Because you cannot do more work of the same quality faster. One thing tech people misunderstand is that these "artisanship" oriented companies can scale at least into the dozens of employees, almost all of whom want to do methodical uninterrupted skilled work or quiet, consistent labour, and who would rather hire four or five very understanding, very capable tech people to handle all that stuff for them. This is not a failing, it's a culture. Some great businesses in the UK run on the "don't add unnecessary tech bollocks" model, and IMO they should be encouraged to continue if they can, because that, it seems to me, is one route to surviving in an AI-bullshit-led industry. The fact that the tech industry seems to thrill at systemically fucking this up and selling systems users do not need based on marketing fear that they are falling behind is quite depressing to me, not to mention a failure of systems analysis. Just because you are a tech person it doesn't mean you should be selling a messaging system to people who actually could just get the benefit from one more person to handle co-ordinating with the front office. Tech people are, IMO, quite irresponsible in this way. We have all been trained to answer "we have a problem with X" questions with "we can build you a Y for that", when responsible consultancy would first rule out non-technical process flow improvements. This is not Luddism. It is obvious that in skilled-work industries you should get things like "office-wide-instant-messengers" out of the way of people doing the skilled work so they can do it uninterrupted at an appropriate pace. There is no non-desk-bound job that is meaningfully improved by notifications buzzing.
• ashanoko 1y ago
  [dead]
• clarionbell 1y ago
  General economic defeatism in this, and similar discussions, is staggering. Historically, many countries were suffering from various forms of economic malaise and managed to pull trough. Countries that lacked almost any form of industry have become powerhouses. South Korea is a good example. The previous century hasn't been kind to Korea in general. By the 50s, the southern part of peninsula was generally less industrialized than the north, and recovering from horribly destructive war. Threat of another invasion from the north never went away. And yet, successive governments have turned things around, and turned South Korea into advanced, functional, industrialized country. It has problems with aging population, but who hasn't? West Germany in the second half of 20th century is another example. Devastated by war, occupied, mistrusted by neighbors, reliant on imported labor. And yet it put itself together. Lately it hasn't been doing so well, but for decades it was a model of prosperity. Stories like this are abundant. Unfortunately, it takes a significant amount of political courage. Politicians must be willing to withstand short term pain, and plan for the future. They must focus on long term prosperity, not on immediate popularity boosts. Everyone here, I believe, agrees that the way things have been going is unsustainable and incredibly damaging to the very people it's meant to benefit. It can be fixed, it will take time, but it can be. Because it happened before.
  • DoneWithAllThat 1y ago
    You give two examples of countries that managed to save themselves but there’s far more historical examples of empires that faded and disappeared entirely, or more modern examples of countries in perpetual (so far) decline and failure. No, stories of turning around failing countries are not in fact abundant. There is no reason to believe the UK will be a success story and lots of reasons to believe its time has come and gone. It is in many ways a failing state with no prospects for recovery. Across virtually every metric it looks bleak. And vague comments about withstanding short term pain and planning for the future ignores that they already tried that, and it didn’t work.
    • Aromasin 1y ago
      The UK faces serious structural problems (low productivity, weak investment, stagnant wages, and an over-centralized economy), but none of that automatically translates to terminal decline. In the 1970s, the UK was dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” reliant on IMF support and wracked by strikes, but it entered a multi-decade period of renewed growth and influence before Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis. The US in the 1970s seemed finished: stagflation, oil shocks, industrial decay, humiliation in Vietnam, a hostage crisis, and a sense of lost purpose. Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Lester Thurow, etc., all wrote about the “limits of growth” and “imperial overstretch,” yet it rebounded to global dominance by the 1990s. The 1970s “decline” narrative didn’t age well. Japan in the 1990s was declared “done” after its asset bubble burst, and the “lost cause” or “lost decade” became a cliché. Yet it remains the world’s third-largest economy, a technological leader, and a model of social stability, public safety, and industrial competence. It has declined maybe in relative GDP growth terms, but in living standards and quality of life, Japan has done remarkably well. Britain still has world-class higher education and research sectors, a strong legal system and institutional stability, cultural and linguistic global reach well beyond its economic means, deep financial markets, and fantastic renewable energy potential. The current doomism, I believe, all comes from public overexposure to tabloid news, which permeates every part of our lives through social media. Scare-mongering has always been the most profitable form of journalism, and articles about the UK's decline make addictive reading for much of the populace. Nobody seems to want to read articles about how the UK produces roughly 15% of the world’s most highly cited research with less than 1% of the world’s population, or how it’s the global leader in genomics, vaccine development, and life sciences (the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine was one of the fastest developed in history), or how it is Europe’s AI hub, home to DeepMind (Google), Stability AI, and dozens of AI startups, with London often ranked second globally after Silicon Valley for AI investment. They tend to write very little on how it builds about 40% of the world’s small satellites, or the fact that it’s a world leader in offshore wind generation capacity - #2 globally after China - or that it has cut emissions faster than any G7 country since 1990 while maintaining GDP growth. There’s very little commentary on the success of the creative industries (film, TV, music, design, advertising), and how they’re a £100+ billion sector and among the fastest-growing parts of the economy, or how the UK is Europe’s largest video game exporter, with studios like Rockstar North (GTA), Creative Assembly, and Frontier. There are endless positive growth stories happening in the UK, but unfortunately, while we’re still leaders in many things, we also pioneered (in partnership with Australia and New Zealand) toilet-paper journalism in the likes of The Daily Mail and later The Sun, which started the mass-market, sensationalist, personality-driven style of journalism that became the global tabloid model. It invented the genre as we know it today, still dominates it, and exported its techniques globally (blame the UK and Rupert Murdoch for the success of Fox News). Radical optimism is quite difficult as a British person, as dour cynicism is our culture’s resting state, but I don’t see the signs of a failing empire personally.
• physicsguy 1y ago
  I think let's not forget that at the start of the period they mention, the UK (and British Empire) as a share of world GDP was larger than the US is today. It was clearly never going to be able to sustain that position. Let's also not forget that the country effectively bankrupted itself during WWII. Investment from the Marshall Plan was basically used to prop up the currency which ultimately failed. There were 'balance of payments' crises well through into the 1970s when Bretton Woods collapsed.
• giorgioz 1y ago
  Italy is barely mentioned in the whole article. Today Italy is the biggest shipbuilding manufacturer in Europe: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-shipbuilding/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... I feel the double standard of such articles quick in pointing out Italy being behind in many statistics (which it is and is fair to point it out). When it's Britain behind the whole article is written only from the point of view of the UK and avoids mentioning what other countries did better. This is unfair. Italy manufacturs the Costa Crociere cruise ships and many other things. Everyone loved to laugh when Costa Concordia sink. It made them confirm their bias that Italian are funny and bad at technical things. While other metrics of Italian excellency are ignored.
  • ReptileMan 1y ago
    There are few ships ever built that don't sink when you ram them properly into rocks. I don't think that I have read a single article that faulted the shipbuilder for the disaster.
    • giorgioz 1y ago
      It's true the shipbuilders were not critized but they were also not praised in this very specific article. Good and bad results should be both noticed. Times in the articles countries are mentioned: Japan 17x Germany 6x USA 4x China 3x France 3x Italy 1x South Korea 1x compare that with the current tonnage of shipbuilding production: 1 China 32,859,862 51% 2 South Korea 18,317,886 28% 3 Japan 9,965,182 15% 4 Philippines 805,938 1% 5 Italy 402,164 0.62% 6 France 326,680 0.50% 7 Germany 289,666 0.45% 8 Finland 261,654 0.40% 9 Taiwan 187,558 0.29% 10 Russia 177,571 0.27% 11 Netherlands 90,596 0.14% 12 Türkiye 79,032 0.12% 13 Indonesia 75,979 0.12% 14 U.S. 64,809 0.10% 15 Iran 64,760 0.09% Italy produces 2x ships than Germany but Germany is mentioned 6x. Stereotypical bias of German being engineers and Italian being funny/pizza makers.
      • giorgioz 1y ago
        South Korea is also freaking awesome and shipbuiling and it's mentioned 1x. Maybe also the reason why the UK is behind is their arrogance in dismissing competitors that they have stereotypically decided they are not good at shipbuilding.
• ReptileMan 1y ago
  TLDR: Failed to innovate and adapt. In a way it is story that repeats itself on a larger scale as a whole with the western world. One of the things that annoys me is that the west lost the opportunity to continue to be world's manufacturing powerhouse in the 90s and early 00s. We should have invested in automation and efficiency to the point where developing countries even if using slave labor and no environmental regulations to still not be able to compete on price of end product. It is not as if there was not substantial technological advantage at the time. If there was going to be a rust belt - well it is better if jobs were outright destroyed/obsoleted than moved to other countries. China has "dark factories" - so little labor that they could turn the lights off. Absolutely no reason those couldn't be in US or UK if proper investments were made at the time.
  • FuckButtons 1y ago
    the rust belt, and deindustrialization in general was a political choice. The free trade agreements that enabled it were enacted for a number of reasons, some well intentioned, but ultimately they were a choice to mortgage our industrial capacity now, in exchange for gdp growth back then.
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  well to be fair UK lost much more important things than shipbuilding shipbuilding is the least of they are gonna worry
• TheMagicHorsey 1y ago
  This article radically downplays the role that unions had in killing the UK shipbuilding industry. While it's true that shipbuilders were reluctant to introduce new technologies and techniques due to capital requirements, the much bigger reason they did not was the impediment put up by unions. Yes, capital expenditure is painful in a cyclical industry, but in previous eras of shipbuilding, companies did invest in modernization ... in those previous eras, unions were much less active or absent. Other countries also faced the same capital crunches and cyclical business environment, and still invested. It was not that the Japanese, Koreans, and Italians were somehow more "risk-taking" than the English ... no, rather their unions had not yet taken hold post-war to smother innovation. Unions always trade away the advancements of tomorrow for the security of the workers today. When one supports a union one should always keep in mind that you are putting down for your comfort today and mortgaging your children's tomorrow. This might not be an issue if your children don't follow your trade. But if they do, you've just screwed them over. The rest of the world doesn't stand still while your union blocks radical progress.
  • Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    Enjoy your two days off this week. Glad you safely made it this far.
    • TheMagicHorsey 1y ago
      From a Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1bbvvxb/comment/kud8ov4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1bbvvxb/comme... You will often hear historians talk about working hours. They explain how Trade Unions and Socialist campaigners brought about a much reduced work day. That happened mostly over the 19th century and the 20th century. This is true, but I think the presentations of it tend to be myopic. In the early 19th century across the whole world people were very poor by modern standards. Due to the Industrial Revolution that changed and in Europe wages increased significantly. In the UK wages in 1900 were more than twice what they had been in 1800. That's in real terms, adjusted for inflation. Some workers campaigned for shorter working hours because they could afford it. Of course, if working hours are lower then total wages are too. Everyone knew this. By the end of the 19th century wages had risen enough that many workers were prepared to sacrifice lower total wages for more leisure time. The labour organizations would never have successfully talked their members into these campaigns unless those members were in this situation. As growth continued in the 20th century and spread to other countries there were more and more people willing to sacrifice some wage for more free time. Suppose that there had been a law in, say, 1770 which forced people to work less than 35 hours per day. In that case many people would probably have flouted the law because their incomes were so low that they considered more work necessary to buy things. Similarly, if people find the standard working week too long then they can search out employers who offer part-time work which covers a shorter part of the week. It's worth mentioning that in a sense, employers never control the amount of time worked. Employment contracts may specify an amount of working time, but people can leave employment. It has always been possible to work for a few years, then quit your job and enjoy some leisure time. Then take up another job. Economists call changes to the number of hours worked over the short-run changes to the intensive margin. The changes to the number of hours worked over the long-run are changes to the extensive margin - changes that come about from the decision to work or not. Of course, this doesn't mean that changes to the intensive margin are irrelevant. When the labour campaigners succeeded in bringing down weekly working hours they really did change things for many workers. Quitting jobs and restarting is inconvenient and risky in times of high unemployment. Of course, some people don't have the willpower to save up for long periods of time either. However, it's also true that changes to the length of the full-time working week probably have much less effect on total working hours than people think. For example, people will tell you that the standard working week in the US is 40 hours. In a sense this is true for full-time employees. Despite that though, working hours have continued to fall from the 1950s to the present day. This is partially because of part-time work, but also because of people taking time off by quitting.
• epolanski 1y ago
  Jm2c, but this sort of problems would've been smaller if the UK stayed in the EU. Then you can do this sort of strategic planning on a larger scale as the EU tends to promote economical activities that make sense for specific countries. The EU, while not subsidizing ship building per se, it did subsidize the R&D. Ship building subsidies are banned in the EU for a very specific reasons: from the 70s to the early 90s European ship builders could not stay competitive with the asian ones. This led France, Spain, UK, Germany into a race of subsidies that: 1. created a lot of overcapacity 2. tanked prices 3. didn't make shipyards more, but *less* competitive with their asian counterparts, as they had less reasons to invest with the guarantee of minimal effort and guaranteed money This is really a damn if you do, damn if you don't situation for which there are no real solutions. We lack the materials, we lack the energy, even if we stepped up to the great levels of efficiency of Japanese/Korean/Chinese ship building have (and we're unlikely to do, it's not just a technological but cultural challenge), we'd still not be able to compete on costs (energy, materials, labor) and R&D (the asian dragons produce way more engineers in the sectors than we do).
• expedition32 1y ago
  They can build faster and cheaper in Asia. Something the Netherlands learned after they threw a lot of money at it trying to save the shipyard industry. Just accept heavy industry is over and find new ways to make money. You will never out build Asians but you can out bullshit them and nobody bullshits better than the Dutch!
  • dist-epoch 1y ago
    The Chinese are moving up the chain. If the Dutch thing they can make money just being a middle man they are in for a surprise. Just like the telecom industry found out.
  • busterarm 1y ago
    It can be done if you can adopt the same practices that the Asian nations did to build their shipping industry. Western governments just aren't committed enough, have too much bloat and want a fiction of separation from private businesses.
• ErroneousBosh 1y ago
  Not a single mention of the Thatcher government in the 1970s, that sold off public-owed industries like British Coal and British Steel, and then set about acquiring and breaking up the shipyards themselves for scrap. All of it was worth more smashed up and sold for scrap, for the little quick "fix" that the Money Junkies in the Conservative government wanted. Unemployment and poverty rose steadily except for the bankers and politicians, the UK lost just about all forms of skilled industry, and by 1987 it was all over with the Stock Market Crash that obliterated the economy. We've had about 45 years of Tory misrule and right now there are no political parties prepared to effect any improvement. It's all bleating about how "illegal immigrants in small boats" are costing billions, but no real breakdown of where the money is going.
  • MichaelZuo 1y ago
    Well after 45 years isn’t that just reflecting what the median voter actually cares about (or doesn’t care about)? If voters were genuinely willing to expend their political capital, time, attention, energy, etc., to a significant degree on this issue, year and year for 45 years… there’s no amount of party intrigues that could have blocked it.
    • Tade0 1y ago
      Don't underestimate the power of divide and conquer. Over here we had miners, farmers, steelmill and shipyard workers protesting due to similar reasons and for the majority the takeaway wasn't that those industries were in danger, but that the protesters demanded too much, because that's what people with influence said.
      • MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Of course there will always be various motivated factions looking to divide and conquer… that’s the baseline background noise in any ruling or opposition party. And the minimum expectation, to advance any policy at all, is to be able to resist that and have leftover political capital, energy, time, etc., above and beyond.
  • 1y ago
• royborole 1y ago
  Wait till you find out how India lost it's ship building industry.....
• shevy-java 1y ago
  Somehow the UK is really in a downhill trend. For decades. BREXIT kind of accelerated that; people such as Nigel Farage won't follow on their promise. There won't be noteworthy economic growth for the common man. The naval situation is even worse, because the UK totally depends on the USA now for its own nuclear arsenal. The UK has basically stopped being independent. Changing this will be hard and I don't think anyone in the UK wants to do that. There is no way for the UK to compete against South Korea's production; Canada will buy more equipment from South Korea. UK has never been in the race for competition (only Germany has). The UK kind of went into decline ever since Thatcher ruled, with a (too) few years in between that were not terrible. BREXIT accelerated this but isn't the root cause - the root cause has to do with structural problems: https://www.ftadviser.com/uk/2025/7/21/the-uk-is-losing-wealth-creators-at-an-alarming-rate/ https://www.ftadviser.com/uk/2025/7/21/the-uk-is-losing-weal...
  • loglog 1y ago
    The conclusions of the FT article are completely wrong. With fewer rich people around, chances are that legislation would be less frequently bought to benefit them at the cost of the country's overall prosperity.
    • energy123 1y ago
      If you insist on only focusing on the negatives of their existence, then sure, eliminating wealthy people sounds like a good idea.
      • greycol 1y ago
        Out of interest what are the positives? Other than cultural, in flagrant displays of excess, I can't think of anything they couldn't accomplish by them existing as poorer business leaders and having competent national wealth funds empowered to lend/give grants. What I'm saying is you may be defending billionaires when you mean to be defending a system you believe is optimal but still has the negative outcome of billionaires (not to imply the billionaires themselves are intrinsically bad as people but the concentration of wealth in their hands is).
• parados 1y ago
  Former UK manufacturing engineer here (1980s onwards). The manufacturing industry in the UK at that time suffered from three serious problems: - Low productivity workforce. There was a huge pool of skilled, low wage, workers that had little incentive (or will) to up-skill. There were few apprenticeship schemes or other education programs to train them for the modern world. - Poor quality management. "Working in trade" had a low social status compared to working in, say, the Civil Service. So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing. - Lack of access to capital. Banks were very reluctant to lend to that sector which made modernisation really difficult. With the ever present threat of nationalization it was hard to raise capital from shareholders. Why invest in technology when you could be nationalised on a whim? I don't believe that these were significantly contributory, from experience: - Margret Thatcher: whilst I'm no fan of her, at most she just administered the needle to a sector that was already on end-of-life support. - The unions: I worked for a large engineering company (fully unionised) that had not had a strike for 30 years. We also introduced modern automation without resistence. The reason? Good management. UK manufacturing is what long term decline looks like. Apart from a few small examples the UK has not been a world beater in manufacturing for fifty years or more. On the other hand the UK is particularly good at Finance, Insurance etc.
  • AppleBananaPie 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing :) I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one. And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.
    • dijit 1y ago
      The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food. The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials). The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food. This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" comes from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector The goal of each sector is to make the previous sectors more productive, and so they're squeezed to become commodity. We therefore intentionally incentivise de-valuing the things that bring us value as a civilisation, and over-valuing the things that don't.
• bparsons 1y ago
  This video answers a lot of the questions around why shipbuilding is concentrated in east Asia now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo&t The TLDR is: - Unique, state backed financial instruments that remove a lot of the risk for purchasers. The state needs a large amount of foreign reserves to do this; - A concentration of industrial and labour capacity. You need to achieve a certain scale in order for the economics to work. They also look at the case of Germany, who don't produce a lot of finished ships, but export the most profitable, complex components to east Asia. They are at least pursuing a rational strategy, even if they don't have the ability to crank out thousands of ships a year.
• dboreham 1y ago
  I've been watching this thread. Almost everything posted makes me say "no I don't think it was that", but also "I suppose that was something of a factor". This probably tells us there are many reasons not one. I will say that having lived through this time, it seemed that the message was "there aren't the things we want to do". Thatcherites said there would be a new services based economy. Nobody said "we could have an excellent heavy industry economy if only the pesky unions weren't involved". Also, at the time (1970s) it felt like the industry was pretty much already gone. In my family the end was the cancelation of the TSR-2 (which my Dad worked on as an avionics designer). That was in the mid-60s. So by the 80s it wasn't that there was an industry that might be saved/preserved, rather the unsavable rump of what once was. Lastly, I'm unconvinced unions are the cause. I think they're the symptom. Business is in decline, management doesn't know what to do, so begins laying off workers. Unions respond. Death spiral. Anyway, for me it seemed like the class running the country just didn't understand nor like the engineering/manufacturing world. They were arts graduates.
• mandevil 1y ago
  This has a connection to the way the British have lionized "Some Guys in a Shed" as their main source of industry and innovation. Their shipyards were dominant at merchant ships, but were all capital light work by skilled manpower. Which worked great, right up until it ran into someone really clever figured out how to mass-produce things, and then the "M/V This Was Laid Down in Ulsan Two Weeks Ago" crushed them all. It was sort of a Innovator's Dilemma sort of situation, where these guys who had built careers out of being the skilled labor and had long hated management were not interested in the sort of capital investment it would take to build their own "M/V This Was Laid Down in Rosyth Two Weeks Ago."
• busterarm 1y ago
  I can't believe how much I read on this that's just dead wrong. The reason China, Korea and Japan dominate shipbuilding today is entirely two factors: export credits and generous financing by government-run banks. The financing terms are so attractive that you don't want to buy from anywhere else. Those governments also reinvested almost all proceeds into expansion. There's something like a three-year backlog and you can place orders without tying up capital.
• Andrew_Flynn 1y ago
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