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 te

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).