|
1500quidporsche posted:I'd suggest reading up on the history of British Leyland since that really was the big one and most the perceptions of that pre Thatcher era of industrial unrest seems to come from that company. My day job is basically writing about poo poo old British cars so I'll try and expand on this without creating a massive effortpost on the post-war British motor industry! In brief, looking at British Leyland as a representative of Why Pre-Thatcher Britain Sucked is the backwards way of looking at it: BL was nationalised because it failed. It didn't fail because it was nationalised. When it fell under government control in 1975 it incorporated the majority of the British motor industry and was the only firm that was still British-owned. It employed about 250,000 people directly in over 60 factories (many of which were the sole employer in their communities) and an estimated 750,000 more in the supply chain. As a private sector industry British Leyland had been brought to complete financial collapse and nationalisation was to safeguard those 1 million jobs and a major strategic industry. No government of the time (Conservative or Labour) would have let BL just go to the wall in 1974, and I suppose that's a big On-Topic point to make. Before Mrs Thatcher became PM the 'centre ground' of British politics was much further to the left than it is now - there were a lot of Torys in the 60s and 70s who would be considered centre-left Labour if they were in politics today while a lot of what would now be considered 'the looney left' had major posts in Labour. Some of Jeremy Corbyn's 'dangerously radical' ideas of today were appearing as solid Conservative policy in 60s. Both parties generally followed what became known as the Post-war Consenus, which was that the government would effectively guarantee the continued existence of major industries as a social, economic and strategic neccessity. This was either by outright nationalisation (such as with the railways, coal and steel) or by the general understanding that if a huge employer like British Leyland collapsed then the government would bail it out. The consensus meant that it was politically very difficult to do any rationalisation of the nationalised industries as the name of the game was acheiving full employment. When BL was first formed the new Financial Director produced an entirely reasonable plan to rationalise the new company's products (by cutting formerly competing models and, say, making only one type of 1.3-litre engine instead of continuing to make both the BMC and Leyland ones in seperate factories). This would have meant cutting 22,000 jobs. The report leaked to the press, their was an uproar, the unions called a series of strikes and the plan was dropped. So BL continued making lots of cars that competed with other BL cars at huge expense and the relationship between management and unions was immediately trashed, which set the stage for all those walk-outs over the type of biscuits in the canteen and such that people like to drag up when talking about the 1970s. But the thing is by 1968 BMC (which sold about 40 per cent of all the cars in Britain) was already haemorrhaging money for reasons entirely of its own making. Explaining why requires too much car-nerd talk but let's just say that BMC managed to introduce the three bestselling cars in British history and lose money on every single one it made. There were already huge labour relations problems, both for reasons of poor management and tensions between the workers, their own unions and the Labour governments of the period. Throw in the 1973 Energy Crisis, which tanked economies across much of the western world regardless of politics and it's not surprising that British Leyland (as a nationalised industry) didn't have a good time. Pre-Thatcher governments were also much more willing and able to dictate industrial policy, leading to some very well-intentioned but ultimately terrible decisions. For example the UK car market massively exanded throughout the 50s and manufacturers needed to expand and modernise their factories (many of which hadn't changed much since the 1920s) but government approval/financial support was conditional on building new factories in areas of high unemployment. This meant that the car makers had to build factories in places like South Wales and Clydeside, 100s of miles from their other factories and their supply chain. Brand new cars built in brand new factories by workers completely unfamiliar with how to make cars were predictably, erm, 'variable' in their build quality and reliability. punk rebel ecks posted:Fantastic post. I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in. In fact BL was 'fixed' - the Thatcher government funnelled over £500 million into BL to keep it afloat and by 1986 (after seven years of Thatcher-led government running) it was making a profit and had a secure future. So it was immediately privatised! That's one of the sad things about British politics - only failing industries are nationalised and any that succeed are immediately 'set free' to make that profit for the private sector, so of course it seems obvious that nationalised industries always fail. But could BL have been 'fixed' while remaining the fifth largest car maker in the world, employing all those people in all those factories? I don't think so. The industry's problems started decades before the government took the reins and by the 1970s the social and political climate made introducing any of the required reforms and changes required to solve them virtually impossible.
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2016 02:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:22 |
|
|
punk rebel ecks posted:Is there anyway the traditional left wing Britain could come back? The D&D crew will be much better placed to discuss that, but I'd say it's possible but very unlikely. And it wouldn't be 'traditional' in the sense of 'the same as we had in the 1970s' - that way of doing things was shown to fail spectacularly and that failure was the main reason why Mrs Thatcher was able to win a landslide election and start hacking apart that Postwar Consensus, the bad bits and the good bits. There's a desperate need for a left wing voice in mainstream British politics and no shortage of people who would benefit massively from its policies, but it would mean smashing the 'Thatcherite Consenus' as firmly as Mrs T smashed the Postwar one. And that would require things to fail as spectacularly for the current thinking as things unravelled in the late 70s: The Winter of Discontent, when a combination of inflation running at 15% and government capping pay rises at 5% led to crippling strike action, including the picketing of hospitals and uncollected bags of trash piling up in the streets, was the clincher and really convinced the British public (and much of the media) that something had to change. If we have another economic crisis in the next few years and, crucially, the blame gets put on the right places, people and systems, you might see a similar broad mood change. The Postwar Consensus was 'just the way things are done' for 34 years and the Thatcherite Consensus has been in place for a similar amount of time. For the past 20 years no one would have thought it possible for someone of Jeremy Corbyn's politics to lead the Labour Party but now here we are... punk rebel ecks posted:IIRC I remember reading articles a few years ago about how the British youth were moving to the right wing and not the left wing. I remember similar articles. But that was because UKIP (right-wing populist Euro-sceptic party, if you're not aware) were in the news as the Next Big Force In British Politics. The youth vote in particular really just expresses complete dissatisfaction with the status quo and just seeks a vaguely credible alternative, be it from the right or the left. UKIP seemed to be that alternative but they then lost their momentum due to internal squabbling and a laughably bad performance in the general election (bad in terms of Pre-Election Swagger v. Actual Result, mainly thanks to our FPTP voting system). Then Corbyn came onto the scene and now there's a potential status quo-smasher as leader of the opposition no less and he has a decent and enthusiastic support base behind him (outside his own MPs, at least...) punk rebel ecks posted:Incredible write up! Thank you  I can do more of the same if you want - I can keep it fairly general and use the car industry as a case study for how things were industrially/economically pre-1979 or I could focus and go into detail about why British cars were so utterly terrible if you want to know how that specific industry did (or, more accurately, didn't) work in this period. I think that's really more for AI than this thread but you're the one asking the questions!The car industry does get thrown up a lot in general discussion about Britain in the 1960s and 70s. 'British Leyland' is a metaphor for the very worst in failed, money-sucking, strike-ridden, under-performing, inadequate, badly-managed nationalised industry (mainly because it was) and anyone who was around in that time will have very clear memories about how badly made and badly designed a lot of its products were. In fact just yesterday I heard some caller on the radio saying how Jeremy Corbyn's policies would "take us back to the 70s and it'll be the Austin Allegro all over again' - the Allegro being lodged in the popular conciousness as a particularly irredeemable turd of a car from BL. You'll read/hear right wingers talking about how the NHS (or whatever public sector organisation is being ripened for privatisation this week) uses 'management policies like something from British Leyland', even today when the company hasn't existed for 30 years. It's a boogeyman used to frighten people about the dark days before Mrs Thatcher came along.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2016 06:32
|
|
|
OK - let's keep things broadly political and talk about what British Leyland meant to the career of this man: This is Tony Benn, who was pretty much the 'anti-Thatcher' in every way it is possible to be - not just in politics and worldview but in background, character, career and so on. He became a committed socialist, a republican, a pacificist and a Eurosceptic (at a time when Euroscepticism was a solid left wing position in British politics). This put him firmly towards the radical 'hard left' wing of the Labour Party, which saw him as their figurehead and was often referred to as the 'Bennite' wing (Jeremy Corbyn was is a Bennite back in the 80s). He was also one of the most outright interesting people in post-war British politics. I'd say that a lot of the social and economic turmoil in 70s Britain was because as the Postwar Consensus gradually collapsed the country was either going to go towards what Benn espoused or it was going to go in Mrs Thatcher's direction - and there were large sections of society that ardently believed in one camp or the other. Even though he was never Prime Minister or even Labour leader his ideas had a huge influence at some criticial times. In 1966 Labour prime minister Harold Wilson made Tony Benn Minister of Technology - this was a new government post specifically dedicated to identifying, developing and introducing new technology, methods and working practices into British industry. Wilson had made a pre-election speech where he talked about reforming socialism with science and forging a new Britain from 'the white heat of technology' and it was Benn's job to put this into effect. As Minister of Technology Benn also headed up the Industrial Reorganisation Committee, which sounds chillingly Soviet but was actually just supposed to identify opportunities for smaller firms to merge to create larger ones - large companies would be able to compete more effectively on the global stage and by merging and rationalising assets the whole British economy would be more efficient. Now we get to the cars. In 1967 the IRC asked the two remaining British-owned car makers to submit detailed accounts and details of their assets, model plans and working practices. Those two companies were the huge but deeply financially troubled British Motor Corporation (BMC) and Leyland Motors which was much smaller than BMC but was much better run and made strong profits. But both firms were losing market share to the British arms of Ford and General Motors and to large (and nationalised) European rivals such as Renault and Fiat. Combining BMC and Leyland would, the IRC hoped, form a mega-manufacturer that could match its rivals for size and would have enough capital to invest in new models and new production facilities, both of which were sorely needed. Leyland's profitability would underpin the whole thing and if all the BMC managers and executives were cleared out in favour of men from Leyland they would be able to run things properly. Problem solved! So Harold Wilson invited the chairmen of BMC and Leyland in for a little talk and 'suggested' that their two companies could be merged. The men from Leyland played an encouragingly hard game, gaining control of the entire domestic British motor industry on very favourable terms and with a lot of government credit guarantees to get things rolling. The Leyland negotiation team, and its press department, continually spoke of their plans for rationalisation, picking the best ideas and products from both sides of the merger and using the sheer size of the new firm to instil new deals with the workforce, reforming working practices and ending the endless cycle of strikes over pay disputes. This was exactly what Tony Benn, Harold Wilson and the government as a whole wanted to hear. And Leyland's account books were exactly what they wanted to see. Unfortunately they, and the financial advisers and even the stock market analysts who gave the merger their blessing with soaring initial share prices for British Leyland when it was created in 1968, had all been taken in by a very effective publicity campaign and some truth-economising by Leyland. As I already posted, the first tentative plan for rationalising the gargantuan company fell at the first sign of opposition (which could only have been expected) and there was absolutely no sign of any attempt by management to have a real discourse with its workforce. And, more crucially, the financial strength of Leyland Motors had been badly overstated. While it may have been profitable in 1967 this was during an economic boom and even then those profits were not strong enough to fund new Leyland car models, let alone to keep the money pit that was BMC going. Labour (and Tony Benn) were out of government in 1970 but were back in 1974 following the disastrous Conservative administration of Edward Heath. A miners strike and the global fuel crisis of 1973 had crippled the British economy and led to the introduction of a three-day working week and electricity rationing to preserve coal stocks. Due to poor sales and recurrent strikes BL was already running at only 60% capacity before the three-day week was introduced and once it was the end result was inevitable. BL collapsed in 1974 and was nationalised in 1975. By this time Tony Benn was Minister for Trade & Industry and so was ultimately responsible for BL now it was in state hands. During his four years in opposition his personal politics had taken a hard swing to the left, from fairly standard 1960s Labour lefty-ness to full-on radical socialism. Having a front-line seat in the divisive world of British industry and watching Britain's negotations over entry to the European Economic Community (forerunner to the EU) had convinced him that the current way of doing things was a democratic con and that ordinary people had little control over their own lives. Benn now believed that the Postwar Consensus, formed by the Labour government of 1945, was only the first step on a massive reshaping of British society and that Labour needed to campaign to keep moving the process on. With that in mind he co-wrote the 1974 Labour manifesto which pledged not only massive nationalisation of industry and infrastructure but the introduction of direct democracy into those industries. As far as BL was concerned its future in state hands was set in 1976 by the government's Ryder Report. This was supposed to survey the firm from top to bottom and plot a path back to profitability but it actually did nothing other than commit the taxpayer to funnelling £1.2 billion (in 1976 money) into BL over the next five years without changing anything else, which would, apparently, magically see a return to profit by 1981. It was literally: 1. Spend £1.2billion 2. ???? 3. PROFIT Unsurprisingly this didn't work, but one of the few things the Ryder Report did introduce was Tony Benn's beloved idea of worker representation committees in 1976. This was supposed to pioneer the idea which would then be spread to other sectors. Unfortunately there were no simultaneous changes to management practice or union rules so they just provided a dedicated forum for two massively opposed sides to have bitter arguments with each other. Worst still, the fractious atmosphere of the British labour movement in the late 70s didn't give the idea a hope in hell of working. A lot of union members and shop stewards saw the idea of cooperating with management as betrayal - the aim was for the union to *be* the management. At the time wildcat strikes were legal and you got the crazy situation of workers at BL factories striking against their own unions. In 1976 British Leyland lost production of 250,000 cars to strike action (at a time when annual production was about 1.5 million) - these were all cars that had been ordered but which were never sold. The most militant factory, the Morris plant at Cowley, experienced over 500 stoppages that year - the majority of which were walkouts of less than an hour. All these stoppages, plus low workforce morale and a completely outmoded approach to quality control led to rock-bottom build quality and reliability even in the cars that were fundamentally good designs - and there were a surprising number of those. Even when the BL factories were running properly the rest of the supply chain would be just as troubled by strike action and poor quality. If Lucas Industries, Pilkington Glass or Dunlop Rubber went on strike and BL's stockpiles ran out then it could either stop its own production (at huge cost) or ship cars to dealerships minus their headlamps, windscreens or tyres, which would be sent on later once supplies were resumed. Dealers don't have the time or workforce to actually finish building a car so these parts were often retro-fittred hilariously badly. By 1977 British Leyland had lost its position as the UK car market leader to Ford, with GM's Vauxhall rapidly approaching from third place and Japanese firms such as Datsun and Honda making serious inroads. Government money earmarked for installing new production equipment was being used just to keep the company afloat. In 1976 the British economy as a whole had faced collapse and the new Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, had to go to the IMF for a loan. Callaghan had become PM and Labour leader following Harold Wilson's resignation in 1976. Tony Benn had stood as a leadership candidate but didn't make it past the first round of voting. Callaghan was a more centrist Labour-ite than Wilson and much less radical than Benn, who was demoted from Minister for Trade & Industry to Energy Secretary. Callaghan appointed a South African called Michael Edwardes as BL chairman in 1978 - the first in a long line of 'outsider' businessmen brought in from the private sector to reform nationalised industries - with the explicit task of hacking BL down to a sustainable size and, in his own words, 'reasserting management's right to manage.' This spelt the end of Benn's workers' committees after just three years. Of course although Edwardes was appointed by a Labour prime minister he was very much in favour with the post-1979 Thatcher government, which appointed a string of similarly hard-nosed 'axe-men' to keep pruning the corporate tree after he left. By 1986 BL had ceased to operate as a large-scale car maker, becoming the smaller, more upmarket Rover Group, which was privatised in 1986 when it was sold to another former nationalised industry, British Aerospace. Following Mrs T's election in 1979 Tony Benn was not only out of government but out of favour within the Labour party - although he still enjoyed strong support from much of the wider labour movement. He argued that Labour had lost the '79 election by failing to fully implement his 1974 ideas and not offering a truely socialist solution to the country's problems. He ran for party leader again in 1980 but was again defeated. He lost his place in parliament in the 1983 election but returned as an MP following a by-election in 1984. He retired from parliament ('to spend more time on politics', in his own words') in 2001. jabby posted:Overall it seems unlikely we will get a Labour government in 2020, but at least he does seem to be having some impact in dragging the overall narrative away from being 'of course we should gently caress the poor, but how hard exactly?' Personally that's all I've ever hoped for from Corbyn. And it seems to be working, as the reception to the budget showed. There are voices against austerity and endless loving-over of the poor and they're not all being treated as bizarre out-of-touch fantasists. Questions are being asked. It's a small step and it's not like Corbyn is single-handedly responsible for it (sadly it was Iain Duncan Smith of all people who brought it up) but it's an encouraging sign. This time last year I'm not sure the same policies would have got quite the same treatment. 1500quidporsche posted:By all means post more or if you think its more AI specific me or you could make an auto history thread which I think there is probably a need for anyways. I was a history major for a year before I realized I was rubbish at it but I still find it fascinating and I hold an endless obsession with BL's history. I'd be up for doing an AI thread looking at some of Britain's more spectacular automotive gently caress-ups.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2016 18:47
|
|
|
punk rebel ecks posted:You should really write some books. That was extremely informative. I'm actually a motoring journalist in 'real life', currently working for a classic car magazine so writing about this poo poo is my day job. That I get to combine history and a bit of politics as well is just a bonus! quote:It's sad that the cooperative like structure failed. Has something like that with a company so large ever succeeded in Britain or anywhere in the modern era? It is sad, but it was doomed to fail when it was introduced. Britain has always had pretty adversarial labour relations and by the 1970s it had gotten really bad for all sorts of reasons. Neither management nor the unions really believed in the idea of worker representation and neither side trusted or respected the other, making the whole idea pointless. If it had been introduced in the late 1940s/early 1950s when the industry was in a much healthier state and everyone was in a much more cooperative mood it might have worked. As far as I know no British manufacturing industry has been as a true co-op. There are lots of retail co-ops though, including the John Lewis Partnership which runs a nationwide chain of department stores and supermarkets and is entirely employee-owned. Germany is very big on worker representation, and has been since it was rebuilt after WW2. As I understand it union membership is mandatory in many German industries and every German company over a certain size has to have a proportion of union representatives on its board. A lot of the German federal states have shares in big regional employers, too. Basically Germany runs something similar to the pre-1979 Postwar Consensus in the UK only it actually works.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2016 20:41
|
|
|
jabby posted:If you want to know why everyone in the UK hates Thatcher someone will have to do effortposts on the Miner's strike and the Poll Tax. Yeah, this. While I'm glad people are enjoying my Tales of Woe From The Car Factories posts, it's not really telling the whole story (although the OP did ask specifically about the UK pre-Thatcher). The car industry imploded long before Mrs Thatcher was in power and, unlike virtually every other manufacturing industry, was almost inarguably in a better state when she left office than when she started. If every industry had been reformed and modernised like the car industry Mrs. T almost certainly wouldn't be reviled across such swathes of the country (for 'swathes' read 'pretty much everywhere outside bits of London and southern England'). As it happens the Tories are generally pretty well disposed to the car industry - the car represents personal freedom and consumerism rather than grubby socialised transport like trains or buses - and it got off pretty lightly. And even then it shed tens of thousands of jobs and closed a dozen or so factories. The traditional heavy industries, especially coal, steel and shipbuilding, were completely gutted beyond any pretense of just pruning away the dead wood, and was done with virtually zero thought for what would happen to the people and places that depended on them for their existence. These were changes driven by ideology rather than just the pressing need to fix a bad situation. Just because I'm churning out examples of how completely dysfunctional much of the British economy was before 1979 shouldn't be taken as support for what Mrs T did in the years afterwards. I can absolutely understand where the hate comes from for many.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2016 23:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:22 |
|
|
System Metternich posted:Interesting stuff about Germany Thanks for this great post! I've always wondered exactly how/why the German socio-economic model came about and why that country, seemingly uniquely, has managed to make some sort of left/right wing compromise work. Really appreciate the effort.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2016 21:18
|
|