Why Britain can’t make it

Andrew Kenny on how boredom killed British manufacturing

Cape Town

Ican see the progress of Britain better than you because I don’t live there. I did for a while as a young adult, from 1972 to 1982, and have vivid memories of Britain then and of episodes such as the three-day week and the winter of discontent. I live in South Africa now but visit England every couple of years for a week or two, and so I have a graphic, punctuated view of its changing, as one can watch a film of a flower opening if the frames are taken at intervals. My strong impression is that in almost every way Britain is getting better, richer and more efficient. The telephones are incomparably better than they were in the 1970s. The train service is markedly better. The shops are cleaner and more interesting. The British bureaucracy that I deal with (National Insurance) is prompt and efficient. The people look more prosperous and are less unfriendly. British bankers are among the best in the world and British soldiers are probably now the best, for the first time in history (except perhaps briefly under Cromwell). Yet amid all this advance, one famous British competence is failing, as it has been failing since about 1870. This strange decline is in manufacturing, and the long slow death of Rover does not really shed much light on its rather mysterious causes.

The British genius that led to the Industrial Revolution combined the imagination of the Greeks with the practical prowess of the Romans. Somewhere around the end of the 16th century, Englishmen of arts and science prepared the realm of thought for the engineers and artisans who changed first Britain and then the world profoundly for the better with their machines. Indeed, it may well be that England’s greatest literary figure and the philosopher who nudged England towards empiricism and so towards mechanical invention were one and the same: Francis Bacon. It was the British engineers, however, who actually delivered us into the modern industrial age. Hargreaves, Telford, Watt, Trevithick, Stephenson, Brunel and other quiet men from England and Scotland turned Britain into a manufacturing wonder, producing one marvellous new machine after another and setting production levels that amazed the world. All of this has gone.

In my childhood in South Africa in the 1950s, British motorcars like Rover, Austin and Morris, and British motorcycles like Triumph, BSA and Vincent, filled our roads. Britain took the lead in nuclear power, quickly designing and building the successful Magnox reactors. Britain was the first to make a jet passenger aeroplane. Today there is no large British motorcar company, British motorbikes have microscopic sales, the British nuclear power manufacturing industry has shrivelled away and Britain is now merely part of European aircraft manufacturing. As a little boy, my ambition was to own a Size Ten Meccano Set. I don’t think that is possible now that I have finally got enough money.

The mystery of this decline is all the deeper when you consider Britain’s prodigious talents in so many of the fields needed for successful manufacture. Despite criticism that her education is slanted too much in favour of the arts, Britain produces large numbers of gifted scientists and engineers. Her workers have shown, under Japanese management, that they can be highly productive. Her advanced legal and financial systems should facilitate manufacturing. And in one field, seldom recognised, England is the world leader.

Somehow you would never expect it of them but Englishmen are masters of design. (I mean design of form.) From the beginning of industrialisation England has produced wonderfully good-looking machines and structures. Her steel bridges at home and across the empire are lovely to see. If I had to list the most handsome motorcars and motorbikes ever made, almost all of them would be English. I like Japanese cars and bikes but I cannot think of any that please the eye. England also introduced something into the design of steel things and functional things that was unique — a jolliness and friendliness. English steam locomotives were hissing monsters but they looked ever so chummy and appealing, so that little boys around the world, in cities and jungles, were instantly drawn to them. Infant boys still love Thomas the Tank Engine. I remember as a child realising that German model train sets were better made than English ones but I preferred the English ones because I liked the look of the locomotives. Red British postboxes charmed the natives in the colonies. The most cheerful-looking motor vehicle ever designed was the Land Rover, which won hearts and leaked oil in every corner of the Empire. The Morris Minor and the original Mini are just so likeable. (I am aware that Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis was not an English yeoman, but he did all his great work in England.) Today, motorcar designers struggle, usually unsuccessfully, to make a car that catches the eye and wins affection. In the past English designers produced an effortless stream of such cars.

What went wrong? I think I have found the answer in my own experience. My first motorbike, which I got in 1967, was British, a 1959 250cc BSA. It was built when the British motorcycle industry had its highest ever export sales and yet was about to experience sudden collapse. The bike had one cylinder, two valves, air-cooling, points, a carburettor, a kick-starter and a vertically split crankcase. It leaked oil everywhere, it broke down nearly every time I used it, it was very difficult to start, it was a nightmare to work on, parts were difficult to get and the dealer treated me like an enemy. In the 1960s Japanese bikes began to annihilate the British industry. I heard various theories of why this was happening. Many thought the Japanese had magic pills. ‘The Japanese killed the British motorcycles with one thing: an electric starter,’ I heard some owl pronounce. Others said that the Japanese won because of this frill or that, because they had multicylinder engines or other novelties.

Fifteen years later, in 1982, I bought a Japanese motorcycle, a Yamaha XT500, the finest motor vehicle I have ever owned. It had, well, one cylinder, two valves, air-cooling, points, a carburettor, a kick-starter and a vertically split crankcase — exactly the same as the BSA. It is superbly reliable, does not leak a drop of oil, starts easily if it is set up properly (which is easy to do), is a pleasure to work on, parts are easy to get and the dealer is polite and efficient. I have ridden it for more than 150,000 miles over tar and dirt, through towns, deserts and bush, and it has never failed me.

Having worked on the two bikes, it is crystal clear why the Japanese is so much better. Everything fits nicely. The metals are of high quality. The castings and machining are accurate. If the British are masters of design of form, the Japanese are masters of design of function. The whole engine is carefully thought out and carefully made so that it performs well and is easy to maintain. None of this was true of the BSA.

Japan does make bikes with more advanced features but this is not what made her successful. Success came from making clean, tidy, economical, reliable bikes that performed well. And this came from persistent care, attention to detail, continual improvement and good customer service.

Another example is Land Rover. Everyone loves that shape, and for a while Land Rover was the most popular four-wheel-drive vehicle in many parts of the world, including South Africa. But they leaked oil and broke down regularly. (The earlier models were easy to fix, the later impossible.) Eventually the most devoted Land Rover owners would give up and tearfully change to a Toyota Land Cruiser, to discover that it did not leak oil and did not break down. I myself had a Series II Land Rover but have now changed to a little Suzuki jeep, which is far more reliable.

Land Rover also shows a somewhat unexpected English failing. It is perfectly normal for businesses to hate their customers, but good businesses adopt towards them the hypocritical courtesy that is the hallmark of successful civilisation. The English are famous for their hypocrisy, but English manufacturers seem unable to disguise their honest loathing of anyone who buys their products. Land Rover dealers are an extreme example. I have heard one horror story after another about Land Rovers breaking down, the stranded owners phoning the dealer for help and the dealer telling them to sod off.

I’ll tell you why British manufacturing died. It died of boredom. Britain has everything necessary for a first-class manufacturing industry except the capacity for continual effort. To keep making small design improvements, planning future development, checking quality, monitoring suppliers, supervising workers and ensuring the customer gets what he wants is tedious. The painstaking steps needed to convert a good idea into a bestselling product are dull. Workers and customers can be a pain in the neck and it requires constant attention to keep the former productive and the latter satisfied. British manufacturing managers find all of this vital but unglamorous work just too boring, just too tiring, and so withdraw from it. I have seen this at first hand.

Bad managers love crises. Time and again, in factories I have worked at in England and South Africa, I have seen the delight of bad managers when a disaster hits the mill, such as a turbine blowing up or a production machine breaking down. The crisis relieves the manager of the need for effort. He does not have to inspire the workers; they are inspired by the excitement of the emergency. He does not have to plan ahead; the crisis has defined the necessary action. He does not have to find meaning in his work; the crisis provides the meaning. English manufacturing performed at its best in the 20th century from 1939 to 1945 during the crisis of the second world war, when it produced magnificent fighting machines in huge quantities. But in peacetime, industrial Britain descends into boredom and manufacturing dwindles.

In the early 1980s I worked at a mill in Bury, Lancashire, which made transparent paper (‘cellophane’). The mill plodded along with not very good production and not very good quality. The workers, gentle people who wore clogs, ate black pudding, used ‘thee’ and took dominoes very seriously, were divided into at least seven trade unions that hated each other and insisted upon absurdly high manning levels. The genial managers surrendered to the unions and avoided taking hard decisions. Then crisis struck. The market was moving away from cellophane. The mill was in debt and losing its customers. We were given an ultimatum: we had six months to improve dramatically or the mill would be shut down. (I think the owners had decided to shut down anyway and just wanted to pay off some debts before they did so.) We did improve, dramatically and effortlessly. The crisis allowed managers and trade union leaders to reduce manning levels. A new spirit of co-operation and determination sprung up. Managers and workers were suddenly on the same side. Nobody seemed to work particularly harder but, with fewer people per machine, production and quality rose to unprecedented highs. In the last month of the mill’s existence, it was producing the most and the best in its history.

I can quite imagine those clog-wearing Bury workers breaking world production records at some Toyota factory in England. The question is why they cannot at an English factory. The answer is that the English managers are not prepared to make the necessary effort to let them do so.

Boredom, I believe, was the primary cause of British manufacturing failure. But it led directly to secondary effects: the replacement of engineers with management bureaucrats and financiers in the running of manufacturing companies, and calamitous mergers, often under the dead hand of the state. The formation of British Leyland sounded the death knell for British motorcars. In 1974 the unlikely — or rather the only too likely — figure of Tony Benn from the Labour government announced the ‘Meriden Motorcycle Co-operative’, which merged Norton–Villiers and Triumph. Private Eye entitled this forlorn venture ‘Benn and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’.

It may well be that British manufacturing was never better than that of other countries but that Britain simply had the advantage of starting first. If, say, Mitsubishi had been around at the time, a Japanese locomotive might well have won the 1829 Rainhill Trials to pull the train between Manchester and Liverpool. Instead of the Flying Scotsman, Britain might have had the Nippon Express, not nearly as gorgeous but faster, cheaper, more reliable, easier to maintain and with better fuel efficiency. As soon as the Japanese and the Germans did get into manufacture they outperformed the Brits, except in times of war.

Britain’s manufacturing decline probably does not matter much. Manufacturing takes a smaller and smaller share of GDP in most advanced countries. Japan, China, South Korea and others can supply us all with superb manufactured products. Britain has moved with great success into other economic fields. I suppose the only regret comes from nostalgia. And if British manufacturing dies of boredom, a deeper question remains. Why are Japanese, Germans, Chinese, Koreans and even Americans able to maintain manufacturing effort without getting bored where the Brits are not? I really don’t know.