Why invite people from commonwealth countries to do the crappy jobs and then close down all the factories. What did the governments think would happen, apart from racism and a blame culture
Because that never happened. They were never invited. The only people 'invited' via formal means by the government were Eastern Europeans under the Westward Ho and Balt Cygnet programs. Some italians were requested by individual companies like London Brick, but never new commonwealth/NCWP sorts. For fairly obvious reasons. Why introduce racial, religious and, in the case of anywhere but the west indies, language fault lines into what was then a largely stable & homogeneous nation. The whole 'we begged them to come' is bogus 21st century revisionism. The only begging that went on was the British government begging the newly independent governments in the subcontinent, and the colonial administrations in the West Indies to stop them from coming by, for example, denying them exit visas.
Thats a lot of it. People blame de-industrialization. But look at two neighbouring cities that have suffered similarly from that in an international context. Detroit Michigan & Windsor Ontario. Both historically dependent on carmaking. One has gone to hell, the other is still frequently regarded as one of the safest & nicest cities in Canada. There is one big difference though...
@@Nick-io9uk. Does it make feel better to blame people’s skin color? Why do you think they become like that ….what was the reason.? Don’t worry your folks( Anglo) will find that out soon, the drugs are killing of you people, the women are not having family ( population decline) and the alcohol is the sleeping aid for many of YOU! Let’s see how far you people fall 😂 I bet you will act a victim
@@Nick-io9uk One's in Canada receiving help from the government to respecialise and the other has a police force that specifically targets and victimises young people of colour you mean? I agree.
In 1780 the West Midlands was a world first. The world's first mass-industrial hub, where production equalled coin, commodity, wealth and on an unimaginable scale. But the debt-based City of London ensured that that wealth, largely, would never go to its producers. It would simply pay and service debt. Which is why Britain remains debt-enslaved.
This is what happens when one listens to economists. Not all economic activities are equal. There is something different about manufacturing. When the UK was the workshop of the world, it became the richest country in the world. When the USA was the workshop of the world, it became the richest country in the world. China is now the workshop of the world, it has got very much richer recently. The UK is never going to compete internationally on the basis of wage rates. So it has to substitute energy for labour. That means the UK should be pursuing a low cost energy policy. Also, it has to be able to do things others cannot. So technological education and training should be a priority. None of this is "rocket science".
However, manufacturing as you can see is susceptible to being overtaken by other nations. The Soviet Union had a very large industrial manufacturing strategy and people were poorer. The key thing is having a balance and ensuring high employment in key areas. Germany for example manufacturing is suffering due to weak domestic and foreign demand, in which case you need the Services sector to pick up the slack. Its not rocket science, its economics which arguably can be more complex at times as higher order multi variate problem compared to rocket science.
@@conconmc The thing is rocket science is *science*, with scientific theories. Economics is a bunch of personally held ideals, unsupported by strong evidence, with little predictive power. I was a Universty academic and was called in by the head of a top business school to vet and _viva_ his PhD student as she was doing complex maths which overturned his pet mathematical model. Much to the head's chagrin I found her maths to be faultless, and her arguments, based on her stated assumptions, led to her conclusion. She got her PhD. The problem with economics is the assumptions, as they reduce the domain of discourse.
@@frogandspanner - Interesting, major advances invariably result from extraordinary individuals vision and will power, and these individuals are rarely economists, academics, bureaucrats or politicians
@@babayaga6376 LOL what exactly has any of these claims got to do with the fact that since 1979 the ASI and IEA have dominated policy making? They're literally lying about what's happened and pretending like they've had no influence these last 45 years. This is how we know an ideology has reached its end point
The West Midlands suffered more than anywhere else in Britain from the process of deindustrailization, in particular the decline of the motor industry.
the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act removed the incentive for local councils to permit building infrastructure. The country is run by Oxbridge graduates who pay no price for being wrong. HR is the only growth profession in the UK due to one set of Oxbridge grads bringing in thousands of regulations in relation to employment. Now Isobel an Oxbridge arts graduate gets paid 250k a year to ensure companies have the right quota of sexual preferences and colours employed.
Local councils were prohibited from building social housing by Thatcher. This didn't help either the building industry, nor did it help 21st century Britain, now suffering a crippling housing shortage
@@roberthorseman7432it was Attlee, in 1947, who allowed all commonwealth citizens to have the right to come to the UK. At the time, 600 million people. What an idiot. Look around you, and see the results. A disaster for us native Brits.
Did you watch and listen to the video? Government intervention was the error. The article is suggesting if Atlee and co didn't get involved, the economy might be stronger today. Because the government's pre Thatcher were propping up loss leading business (ie the coal industry) then that capital could best have been allocated elsewhere. Unfortunately the neo liberalism of the last 45 years has just been too little too late.
You failed to explain why e.g. the Labour government under Harold Wilson considered the growth of Birmingham as "threatening". Environmental objections had not been thought as important in the early 1970s. I think it is not wrong if a government cares about threats, but the error might have been that they saw a threat where actually was happiness.
Omg, grinding my teeth to paste. You are definitely right in the matter of government suppressing the organic movement within the country of capital and labour. There is nothing useful I can add except the observation of a sympathetic outsider that heartened me on my only visit to your islands, May/June 2016: a sense of stifled potential within the people generally, and that potential is considerable in breadth and depth. May our countries re-establish the barriers that check and deny an overbearing onerous and deceitful bureaucracy.
@@vlad.the.impaler. Britain's wealth was built by having those people within the empire, but prohibited from trading with other European powers. The opening up and loss of the colonies destroyed Britain's markets. So you're right for the wrong reasons.
no mention of the poor labour relations in the 1970s which did a lot to accelerate the decline of the British-owned car industry largely based in the Birmingham area
@stevenfarrall3942 total rubbish. I worked as an auditor of RR in 1970s. They went bust,laddie, because they had contract with Lockheed at too low a price on their RB211.not really!
@@erongi233 I agree with your assertion regarding the RB211 costs being out of control and the connected issue with the Lockheed contract. If re-read my comment I say 'a priori failed government interventionism and bad money. By 1971 the inflationary consequences of the welfare state and other factors were wreaking their havoc on industries like aerospace. This was making GBP weaker and leading to a lot of problems for firms trading internationally (ss the ASI video also states). Money is a nationalised commodity in the UK - the post WW2 labour government nationalised the BofE - enabling the massive over-production of money and credit. This tends to make manufacturing of things like aircraft harder to do profitably because of the long lead times, whereas it makes the production of goods for immediate consumption easier. It was a priori government failure that destabilised RR. Oh and FYI I did a dissertation on the RR failure for my business studies course.
The British government taxed its economy to death starting in 1944. The taxation of wages, goods, services and the tools of production will inevitably destroy an economy. Trying to run a welfare state with such a tax system is suicidal. Neither left nor right acknowledge this. We are now approaching the end of the doom loop.
The truth is the diametric opposite: we slashed taxes in the 80s and now the country is at the mercy of the private interests that the ASI represents. You also left out what deregulating the banks left us with
@@physiocrat7143 That's what Thatcher is most famous for: cutting taxes on the well off. You can lie or deny it all you want, that's what happened. The reason VAT was created and increased by the Tories was to transfer more of the tax burden to the less well off You guys can cry and wail all you want, you just can't accept that neoliberalism has been a disaster and that it's coming to an end
Post WW2, economic growth was the greatest in the 1950s-60s, when taxes were at their highest. As the Scandinavian economies prove, high taxation doesn't, by itself, cause economic stagnation. What matters is governance. The UK failed to successfully transition from relying on its empire to becoming self-reliant.
Appalachia suffered a similar fate due to people never being allowed to diversify the economy or build personal wealth once the government entangled coal companies took hold
I don't deny that Attlee's mass nationalisation program and industrial strategy were very flawed policies, but Thatcherism didn't work! It lead to asset stripping and look at the end results - mass outsourcing of Britain's industries, over reliance on other countries for imports, a misbalanced economy with it skewed towards financial services(which is of questionable economic benefit).
As the video shows, most of the damage was done before the Thatcher reforms and monetary squeeze to kill inflation. Unions were out of control. As for asset stripping, I don't think there were many assets worth taking by the end of the 1970s.
Manufacturing output actually grew under Thatcher, the issue was the reduction of labour intensification during that period, which happened in every other country in the world too.
Manufacturing as a percentage of the economy shrank by more in the early years of the 21st century than it did during the worldwide recession of the early 1980s (caused by the Iranian revolution).
We need to concentrate on high quality high skilled manufacturing but the government has allowed mass low quality and unskilled labour, this is not going to end well is it.
The UK has been going 50% at best ever since WW2. No idea why but every cisris that comes up seems to last longer in the UK than in comparable countries?
Britain made pretty much every country in their, ever so BRUTAL, empire independent, and went through 2 an entire world wars, that bankrupted the country. So, people from all of those places (a lot of whom were poor because of what Britain did in their land) came to Britain (some were invited) for better economic opportunity. I find it hilarious that so many of you focus on the “issue” of immigration, but never actually want to discuss WHY people migrated to Britain post WWII…
So basically you're saying we should turn a blind eye to the destruction of what little natural area still survives. Yes, the industrial revolution created a lot of wealth, but on the back of huge amounts of environmental destruction, as well as worker exploitation. Your claim that workers of that period were well paid is just plain wrong, it was a time of children up chimneys and factory workers trudging to the mill in the early morn. We don't want to return to that type of exploitation for the sake if GDP and the enrichment of a small minority of the population.
Exactly my thinking. I am no socialist (but I am somewhat of a social-democrat), and it's possible that some of what he says is correct, but he seems to idealize a time when the "little people" suffered much more than they do today. There are things to repair. Lazy people shouldn't get unemployment money. However, sick people who can't work should. It's complicated. It's not black and white.
If the Empire was successfully reformed in the 19-th century to integrate the disjointed economies across the globe in a common market, Britain could have wielded the Great War from a much better position, avoiding the mounting costs of maintaining overseas territories and keep its status as net creditor and industrial leader.
But alas, that would have required forethought and some modicum of contrition. Instead, we got India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel and several other wars over the boundaries we imposed.
@@Sean-p3o The Balkans are closer to some parts of the UK than some parts of the UK are to each other. Stopping people from thinking you can murder your way over other people's borders is why you've never had to go to war.
To be fair, those demographics came here because Birmingham had a lot of work to offer in factories. Most of the people who are unemployed and problematic in this city today would have had good honest jobs making stuff 60 years ago.
@ponderingspirit that's not what he means. He means the gov are paying older muslims on thr dole that don't work and just go to a mosque. Try read the statement properly
@@I_am_Jesus_though What data shows they're on the dole? And how do you know which mosque they're attending? let alone their whereabouts. If they're older, they're of pensioable age. What's the problem? You weird little racists.
Britain wrecked itself fighting wars it couldn’t afford in the first half of the 20th Century America is doing the same thing this century Col Macgregor Ret
True. Especially it should not have been involved in WWI. It should have allowed Austria to fight its war against Serbia on its own. Britain found a chance to fight Germany and at the end it lost the empire.
@@georgerj2419 Britain joined WW1 to protect Belgium. British foreign policy has always recognised that a mainland Europe dominated by one country is bad for Britain.
@@nigelgarrett7970How did that work out as Germany (even a divided country) remained the strongest country on the continent- especially economically Belgium was a pretext and excuse for those that wanted war Britain sent an army over that wasn’t designed to fight against large continental armies We should have told the Germans that we would keep them out of the Channel and North Sea if they had designs on channel ports.
Conservatives Govt seriously under funding it between 2010-2022 councils took a 50% cut in funding. Also birmingham council lost a law suit which costed millions and played a major role in the bankruptcy. But Look at what the Conservatives did to croydon and thurrock councils. With thurrock they took out a massive loan for some risky investments and it backfired fucking bankrupted them. 😂😂 They bankrupted my council Wiltshire which they've ran for the last 100 years fuck knows how they managed that because they dont invest here the economic illiterate twats dont.
Brilliant. Birmingham was allowed to 'develop' aaccording to the 'schedule of history' - roughly 'I have seen the future and it works'. This tyoe of prophecy is still with us - so-called 'Climate Change' is its latest manifestation. Birmingham demolished its centre, and surrounded it with ring roads, thus ensuring a complete separation of city and suburb, with dire social consequences. The Rootes Group of car makers was destroyed by government intervention when it was forced to move to Linwood, Scotland. The local labour force had no experience of car production, and went on semi-permanent strike, despite wages being nearly twice the local level. Together with a strike in its Acton factory, Rootes failed shortly afterward. As with today's governments, anything other than the real problems facing people were considered, whilst dream state after dream state took up the time and tax money which should have been spent elsewhere.
This is a rather simplistic picture. Many factors were mot mentioned, the role that the Empire played, the mass exodus from Ireland to England during the Famine, remember this was "internal" migration, since Ireland was part of the UK at the time. Many Irish, like my great great grandparents, settled in Liverpool, many others in Birmingham. As for the Green Belt, this was demanded by towns like my own, Bromsgrove, which have already seen the loss of areas like Northfield and part of Rubery, absorbed into the city as 'new' suburbs. We had no wish to become part of the conurbation, as the former Worcestershire towns of Dudley and Stourbridge had been. Thanks to the Green Belt, we retain our character and history and attract millionaire residents to areas like Barnt Green, home of professional footballers and music stars like UB40
An interesting insight into my home town. However, I must correct you on something;- "Birmingham has more canals than Venice". In the early 80's, when the city hit rock bottom and looked like a right dump, a group of staff at the city's economic development unit brainstormed ideas to change people's perceptions of the city and came up with some things which became urban myths; the one about canals being one, "Birmingham has more acres of parkland than any other city in Europe" and "Birmingham has more trees than Paris" being two more. They deliberately dropped these into casual conversations with people like journalists and elected council members and soon they had spread like wildfire across the city and beyond. They are eminently believable because Birmingham does have a lot of canals, parks and trees. They were picked up and repeated by Brummies desperate to see something positive in their decaying city. I was one of them. This was told to the BBC journalist and radio presented, Ed Doolan in a radio interview with someone who worked at the EDU.
Good video -but would have been great if the roll of central banks, lack of financial investment and fiat currency were included in the reasons for decline.
I have learnt so much from this report. Birmingham’s decline is the result of government folly, from 1945 onwards. I can hardly believe the Distribution of Industry Act was passed in 1945.
GOD I AGREE WITH THIS. The treasury spreadsheets have wrecked this country. Let people and business choose their paths rather than trying to impose a politburo centrally planned strategy. its so obvious.
The country is completely dominated by the financial and corporate interests that the ASI represents. If the treasury has been serving anyone it's them.
@@Phil-n7c nonsense, the ASI do not represent financial and corporate interests anymore than they represent small business and workers. Anyone who wants economic freedom is represented by ASI. You my friend are part of the 'useful idiots' who keep the corporate overlords in the comfort they've become accustomed to. These people fear free markets and competition more than anything as they depend dearly on government regulation and handouts from labour and the tories to keep them afloat. The opposite of what ASI stands for entirely.
For an advanced economy you need skilled people to invent, develop and manufacture innovative products. As an engineering graduate in the early 1980's I experienced the consequences of the Tory deskilling of the engineering industry. Watering down engineering degrees to encourage young people onto courses many didn't want to do - better on and engineering degree than down at the job centre and forced to apply for menial jobs because you failed (or perhaps got 1) A level . Any engineer (particularly ones in the bigger companies) will have experienced useless undergraduates and graduates who weren't interested in engineering and knew little. Some of them openly bragging they would never have to pay off their student loan because they would never earn enough. As the video says, this country can't compete on low cost manufacturing. The problem is we can't compete on high value manufacturing either. With the last crop of decent engineers graduating in the 1970's and early 1980' now heading for retirement there are simply not enough clever young people in engineering. That isn't going to change any time soon, if at all. Cheap energy and relaxed planning rules wont change that either.
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You fail to mention that Conservative governments between 1951-64 were just as determined to force industry to relocate away from the Midlands to e.g. Liverpool and Scotland. You also make no reference to the economic impact of New Towns and why some succeeded and others failed. Finally, the Conservative Government of 1970-74 began with a free market strategy but, abandoned them following the rescues of Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. It was the failures of the Heath government that propelled Margaret Thatcher to become leader of the Conservative party in 1975 with all that followed from 1979. Your analysis whilst interesting needs to be more nuanced and accurate,
Do you think there was no industry in Scotland? The Scottish steel industry was destroyed by governments who could not see beyond the Tweed. Glasgow had the largest concentration of railway works in the country, some years more ships were launched on the Clyde than the rest of the world put together. What were thriving concerns, were bought up by English companies ie. dairies, insurance companies etc., closed down & head offices relocated south.
Rather unconvincing attempt to shift the blame for deindustrialisation away from Thatcherism and free market dogma. British industry paid the price for being the first country to industrialise (no competition in world markets) and then struggling to modernise with outdated institutions and lack of investment. Birmingham is a classic case with its small workshop based industries. The impact of the world wars particularly the tight constraints on investment after WW2 should not be underestimated. The post war attempts to modernise and rationalise industries through mergers were too little too late. The deliberate policy of deindustrialisation of the 1980s onwards with the focus shifting to services and particularly the finance sector (which formed the social base of Thatcherism) glossed this failure over for a while particularly with North Sea Oil revenues but has had disastrous long term consequences
Absolute utter bollocks. The council went bust for two reasons A a disastrous equal pay judgement that was the largest ever in Europe B the massive cuts from central government whilst paasing on responsibility for many aervices particularly housing
While your point about the equal pay judgment is correct, it also fits with the broader trend of pay being determined by government, specifically the minimum wage, instead of market forces. For context, the judge in the case decided that dinner ladies should be paid the same as bin men. That these two jobs are completely different is apparently irrelevant. So I think this is consistent with the video’s thesis that government interventions have wrecked Birmingham.
Brum really peaked during ww2, aircraft manufacturing, castle Bromwich, BSA, Britain Small arms, leading to British car and motorcycle manufacturers, like my first Car, Morris 1100, happy days, when Chelmsley Wood was still green belt.
Stalin was shocked when Attlee sold him jet engines 'not to be used for the military'. It was not long before a Russian jet engine similar to the one sold was in the MIG 15 killing UN soldiers during the Korean war.
Every country that embraces neoliberal economic policies always ends up with the death of highly productive manufacturing industries, replaced by a hyper-financialized economy driven by asset price speculation and fueled by debt leverage. (Note: "Asset" usually refers to real estate and company stocks). This always leads to a situation where economic wealth is concentrated in a handful of locations while the rest of the country stagnates, if not degrades. A two-speed economy where the capitol is opulent while the districts are barely alive. Many argue that the neoliberal economy espouses deregulation. What they leave out is that only the finance industry is deregulated. Everything else is regulated to death! The City of London is the perfect example...
But why will not the likes of Liz and her band of right wing nuts not admit that what they call 'Red Tape', is Heath and Safety rules that help to protect working people?
We smashed the post war consensus in the 80s. Are you seriously arguing that policies abandoned 45 years ago are to blame? The ASI just can't face up to what they've done to this country
When an economist without detailed knowledge of the subject should not be allowed to give advice. This is why teaching economics should be radically changed by infusing with history, tech, and sociology.
We sub contracted manufacturing overseas. Those countries got rich. We stagnated, with gdp bolstered by London money markets. Post Brexit has just doubled down on decline - no one wants to use the city anymore. New listings are going overseas. Intellectual property the same. What's left?
Thatcher was right about being more productive on the world scale but she failed as she had no plan on how to employ those unemployed by her policies and beating the unions, the people were abandoned unless you lived in the south and south west. There was little investment in new manufacturing industries to employ the masses unless it came from inward investment like Nissan, Honda etc. Triumph motorcycles and Land Rover proved how it could be done to some degree but it didn't happen often enough thanks to inept governments.
Strange that they refer to the Labour Government being responsible but slip by that the polices that he criticises (noting that UK coal industry was at the forefront of the industries productivity in the 50s not an industry in decline until the mid 60s) were not only continued but taken much further by the Conservative Governments of Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Heath. Also bypasses that not having meaningful energy, industrial and transport policy in the UK for the last 40 years has not lead to an industrial renaissance and only need look to the water industry to see what happens when environmental legislation is nolonger enforced.
Is there even a single party in this country that recognises the potential for facilitating rather than directing high value added manufacturing in this country?
The video begins by asserting that Britain’s decline began in the 1870s but asserts that the cause of the decline was Clement Atlee’s policies post 1945? What am I missing here?
What an interesting video, and extremely thought provoking. Of course it is 19 minutes of someone's understanding of what is destroying my home, Birmingham. In 1969 we were shipped out to Redditch to begin a new life with the movement of my firm and job. The movement was very well planned and gave me my wife and I children a new life from the slums of Birmingham to a tree covered Redditch, heaven. But of course forced removing due to financial poverty is a devastating process, and this video made light of migration. It is true I am afraid that successive government's and their narrow view of their own idealism that has exasperated the decline of Britain's manufacturing. The nightmares of union dominance and managerial inability to find common ground, or take on unreasonable union demands, again exasperated a real desire to improve and further industrialisation. At 74 I can look back at a life of being a young communist, a socialist, a liberal, a Conservative and now....nothing. No one is better or worse for deindustrialisation, we all found was individually to achieve it. Good video tho. Alan
Deindustrialisation is what killed Birmingham, same as most of the North. Immigration hasn't exactly helped but it is not the main reason we are in this mess. The UK has been in decline since WW2.
@@cyborgbadger1015 The UK created Concorde in the post war era. And the internet and the world wide web. And many other innovations. It's ideological twaddle about "since WW2 - the post war era was literally called the "golden age of capitalism"
@@Phil-n7c The UK created Concorde - in collaboration with the French (that's why there's an extra 'e'). The internet was created in America (ARPANET). And the WWW was created by a Briton - working in Switzerland.
@@nigelgarrett7970 That's not true, the origin of the internet lies in packet switching which was invented by a British man in London working for the Royal Mail. Correct, Concorde was a joint endeavour with the French using public investment in both countries. An incredible achievement which we note the free marketeers have been unable to replicate. The swinging sixties were also "decline" were they? Britain is only one of two net exporters of music globally. British football the most popular anywhere? Who cares where Berners-Lee was working? This country's record on innovation is second to none including in the post war era. You're just regurgitating the same old ideological nonsense now the latest Right wing idea has failed even on its own terms
The argument put forward in this video is a classic example of deciding in advance that something is the case and then presenting every fact that supports it in the most simplistic way possible, whilst conveniently ignoring anything which doesn't. So Foxes Mints were unable to build a factory in the 1940s. By the 1980s, Leicester's growth had slowed. Well there you are, what more do you need to know? The ASI is a well known right-wing think tank. So by definition every single thing the Attlee government did must have been a mistake. That has to be the starting point for any analysis.
I'm not gonna argue with you on the financial merits of what you say, because I'm no economist. But here's a question: given that you preach in favor of an unregulated industry with weaker/no worker unions etc. - I assume you'll agree to be the first in line for that hard-labour manufacturing job for £2/hour. Right? If the economy is "doing well" and 99% of the people don't feel it - the economy is not doing well. You seem to yearn for a time when the gap between the few rich and the many poor was massive (much more than today), when most Brits couldn't afford to see a doctor, when most Brits lived in horrible sanitary conditions. What for? Who's going to enjoy that "booming economy"? Let's face it: manufacturing jobs have left the West because people don't want to work like slaves and earn very little, and because in the West they can currently afford it. If you want to compete with China, you have to have these Apple factory-cities where so many people committed suicide that the management put nets underneath the windows to prevent people from jumping to their death. Again, I have to assume you'll be the first to volunteer to work in these conditions.
really interesting and informative video. as someone who has lived through many of the changes to birmingham, coventry and liecester over many it explains mush of the hidden background to my experiences, some political bias comes through though.
This report was an excellent overview and analysis of UK industrial policies over the decades. Thankfully you have moved past the Thatcher bashing explanations to hit upon mure depressing issues like govrernment intervention and a belief that the government knows whats best. Atllee and Wilson were besotted with state intervention which ultimately meant endless taxpayer support for uneconomic behemoths. Look at how the NHS contines as a failing enterprise to this day. It is a bottomless pit. Well done!
"...Britain's success"... in 18th/19th century, industrialisation in response to "...economic and social conditions..." - a rose-tinted travesty of the truth. As if the average mill & factory-owners cared a hoot for the desperate conditions his workers slaved under or pertained previously. It was only embarrassment & religiously-inspired guilt, coupled with employee "combination" & rage, which mitigated the worst of industrialisation's consequences. And the need for modest employee literacy/basic skills & trainability. An employee having been expensively trained was a wasted asset without improvements in health. Employer benevolence was the exception.. "...High wages..." we are told, a consequence of such benevolence.. No, just a transitional blip from pre- to post-industrial eras, supply/demand transient anomalies. Low regulation in A.S.I.'s preferred regime is about zero-hours contracts, 60+ hour weeks American/Chinese style, declining Health & Safety provision/inspection/paid holidays, a race to the bottom. Only when the NHS is replaced with expensive USA-style health insurance will they be happy. Thatcher's "golden era" was all about a Reaganomic "trickle-down" illusion, now comprehensively debunked with excruciating income-gap widening due to the employee/employer power imbalance the A.S.I. so favours. AT least German capitalists have been prepared to invest long-term, which was the bedrock of their success outstripping us. Now Chinese government direction of investment/industry seems at odds with A.S.I. 's core nostrums
@@jamie59685 Did I say that ? No. If you think those mill/factory owners were typically philanthropists ... as well as your Port Sunlight, Bournville village etc the vast majority were in for exploiting nimble-fingered kids, subjecting women workers to "phossy-jaw" (Google it) & all the rest. No workers' comp for them, outrageously long hours/hideous conditions too.
It seems that the ASI would champion the idea of mass migration leading to places suffering more congestion, shortage of public services, overcrowding etc while other areas end up as dilapidated ghost towns. Isn't a simple solution provide incentives to redistribute opportunities around the country? Also people get attached to their local area. I moved away from my local area to London for opportunities, but it meant severing ties to family, friends and areas I knew and loved. In time I got to know others in the area but London is full of people feeling lonely and isolated as they have moved there and it is relatively hard to get to know people there compared to other places.
Britain had a monopoly on Technology, which others for a while could not compete, along with a commonwealth of countries forced into (mercantile) supplying cheap raw materials for Britain to turn into expensive goods ( Thomas Mun, 'buy cheap by using the power of wealth, sell them dear by monopoly and again wealth = power to manipulate governments and kingdoms).
It should have been left to grow organically, and not have ideological restraints put on it. Ideology tends to be illogical. I remember in the late 60's and into the 70's, there seemed to be never ending strikes and one wonders if the strikes and joining the EC in 1972, was a two pincer attack on the country.
I am surprised to hear Attlee being a cause in the UK's decline. The decline started in the 1880's and became immeasurably worse from about 1970 leading eventually to Thatcher He was responsible for serious social/educational reform and had a good attitude to the Empire. Bearing in mind he had power over a bankrupt nation aided and abetted by Lend Lease ; as of now I think well of him. I lived and worked in Coventry from the 50's to 2000. I cant see the disaster that has occurred had much to do with Attlee
@@physiocrat7143 Agreed, but it's questionable if ALL post WW2 UK taxes were "ruinous". Some certainly were and it's also true that an economy can thrive with low taxes (e.g. Hong Kong), but taxation itself isn't problematic. The problem is poor governance. When it was created, the UK welfare state was designed as a "(helping) hand up", but over successive decades, to secure votes from an aging population, politicians have turned it into a "hand out". Meanwhile, over the same period, taxes have fallen. Clearly, taxation isn't the issue.
@GonzoTehGreat HK thrived on the revenue from the sale of 40 year leases. Taxation is very much the issue. If you tax windows then you will have bricked up windows. If you tax honest work and trade, you can work out what the results will be
once that london gets all it needs and then all it doesn't need will the government look to other places, but to just think about improving those areas before heading to london again for another railway.
So, suppose wages were so high in Victoriana. Why did the Rowntree Commission state otherwise concerning malnutrition ( if wages were so high, then why was malnutrition so high?) and early death ( also due to literally being worked to death) of the masses in such industrial cities as Birmingham? Please don't insult the hundreds of thousands of early deaths due to slum housing, with little or no sanitation, back to back with no airflow, all within walking distance of a factory, built on the remaining bits of land by builders using off the peg designs for a minimum cost build to the detriment of the workers being exploited by their new landlords as well as at the workplace with 12 to 24-hour shifts (when large orders came in then lays offs with no income when markets crashed) 7 days a week including children. Rewriting history makes your arguments appear weak concerning 'free trade' (that has never existed as Adma Smith's examples were based on two sides being of equal power with no other demands, being honest and never using cartels, wealth or leverage of the law to exploit, his war against mercantilism was indeed needed and brave, but his ideal has never been met, and mercantilism continues to this day with Corporates replacing the likes of Thomas Mun ( 'sell them dear') and his former East India Company.
I grew up in Sheffield. It's a ghost town. 👻🏙️ Once the steel works went the decline was terminal. They tried to revitalise the city by building pointless things like Meadow hall which destroyed the city centre. They spent 5 years building a tram system which exacerbated the decline because no one could get to their business! I left 20 years ago and was glad to do so.
So long as you dont go out of the core central bits. Every large English city since the 2000s (perhaps 1980s in London) has followed the folly of american cities. Lavish money on making the few blocks of the centre look all new and shiny, and let the other 95% where most the population live and work go to rack and ruin. They havent adapted, they just have massive funds spunked on them taken from everywhere else.
But that's the point of the piece, isn't it? The cities originally evolved and built themselves, now they have to be artificially enhanced by authority
There is some merit to the claim that Industrial Strategy and the strength of trade unions in maintaining liveable wages played a major part in downturn of the midlands economy. I argue that there are other factors that weigh equally as significantly. First, as pointed out in this video, the Black Country and surrounding areas were progenitors of scaling up of industrial capacity, driven by high labour costs and availability of local coal (energy) resources. Part of the fall can then be attributed to loss of competitive advantage once the benefits of first-to-market became less pronounced. Second, since improved planning is one of the conclusions of this piece, while railway mania accelerated building of infrastructure increasing profitability, the lack of long-term thinking/planning has been a major cause of current infrastructure issues. Between the end of WW2 and the 1970s, Herbert Manzoni's plan was to alleviate mobility issues identified post-industrialisation. At the time, the answer was to transform Birmingham into a car-centric city. This had the effect of driving down footfall within Birmingham, denying the city the opportunity to diversify away from industry. Overlooking other factors for brevity, my general conclusions are: 1 While planning reform is a positive step, a centralised vision must be created to prevent short-term solutions. For example, improved public transport options will lower dependency on cars, improve mobility and increase footfall 2 While the lowering of energy costs would be beneficial to industry in the region, we have to consider other competitive disadvantages, such as wages and productivity relative to competitor nations. Coupled with that, if the aim is to increase exports, we must also consider tariffs and non-trade barriers - what are we making and who are we making it for?
The ASI are fanatics who solely care about PRIVATE interests. Of course they'd attack trade unions. The little fellas who are so concerned with "freedom" really want the freedom to order everyone else around
This should be seen by every incoming government- UK has been paralysed for decades- we ended up making poor quality good by low skilled labour- now its bankers barbers and baristas- the government strategy should be cheap energy, skills training ( tax breaks for training - not useless degrees) bulldozer old brown field site, like touch regulation on these sites- and high quality medium rise housing for people and their families- then let the market evolve
The government should be a fair-play regulator, not an intervenor in the market. This is what happened during the Victorian era, when Britain excelled in industrialisation. Hopefully, people will vote to someone who comes up with more right aligned economic policies over the left socialist ideologies.
As the video points out, things were going wrong in the late 19th century. There were two factors - the growing strength of trade unions, which almost always had a luddite attitude to new machinery and technology. Secondly, the state education system spent more and more money teaching useless knowledge rather than the know-how that a modern economy needs.
Working class people were not getting their fair share of the cake and were seduced by socialism. It started with the Inclosures of the 18th century and the Dark Satanic Mills, the Peterloo massacre, Chartist, etc.
The trade unions were what ensured the wealth workers created was actually spread around the community more. You guys know very well neoliberalism is coming to an end and you just can't accept it
13:05 Basically Birmingham wasn't allowed to develop because it wasn't London.
Haha look at Liverpool in 18th Century and the 1970s.
@@scousebadger0077And how did Thatcher treat Liverpool?
salt and vinegar with those chips sir?
That’s insane. That’s self sabotage because look at Birmingham now. Britain truly pathetic sometimes.
It’s full of migrants who don’t fund themselves that’s why it’s gone bankrupt, London hasn’t because it’s financial hub.
Why invite people from commonwealth countries to do the crappy jobs and then close down all the factories. What did the governments think would happen, apart from racism and a blame culture
Because that never happened.
They were never invited. The only people 'invited' via formal means by the government were Eastern Europeans under the Westward Ho and Balt Cygnet programs. Some italians were requested by individual companies like London Brick, but never new commonwealth/NCWP sorts. For fairly obvious reasons. Why introduce racial, religious and, in the case of anywhere but the west indies, language fault lines into what was then a largely stable & homogeneous nation.
The whole 'we begged them to come' is bogus 21st century revisionism. The only begging that went on was the British government begging the newly independent governments in the subcontinent, and the colonial administrations in the West Indies to stop them from coming by, for example, denying them exit visas.
Thats a lot of it. People blame de-industrialization. But look at two neighbouring cities that have suffered similarly from that in an international context. Detroit Michigan & Windsor Ontario. Both historically dependent on carmaking. One has gone to hell, the other is still frequently regarded as one of the safest & nicest cities in Canada.
There is one big difference though...
@@Nick-io9uk. Does it make feel better to blame people’s skin color? Why do you think they become like that ….what was the reason.? Don’t worry your folks( Anglo) will find that out soon, the drugs are killing of you people, the women are not having family ( population decline) and the alcohol is the sleeping aid for many of YOU! Let’s see how far you people fall 😂 I bet you will act a victim
@@Nick-io9uk One's in Canada receiving help from the government to respecialise and the other has a police force that specifically targets and victimises young people of colour you mean? I agree.
@@Nick-io9uk ones in America and ones in Canada.
Is that it.
Genius.
In 1780 the West Midlands was a world first. The world's first mass-industrial hub, where production equalled coin, commodity, wealth and on an unimaginable scale. But the debt-based City of London ensured that that wealth, largely, would never go to its producers. It would simply pay and service debt. Which is why Britain remains debt-enslaved.
This is what happens when one listens to economists.
Not all economic activities are equal. There is something different about manufacturing.
When the UK was the workshop of the world, it became the richest country in the world.
When the USA was the workshop of the world, it became the richest country in the world.
China is now the workshop of the world, it has got very much richer recently.
The UK is never going to compete internationally on the basis of wage rates. So it has to substitute energy for labour. That means the UK should be pursuing a low cost energy policy. Also, it has to be able to do things others cannot. So technological education and training should be a priority.
None of this is "rocket science".
However, manufacturing as you can see is susceptible to being overtaken by other nations. The Soviet Union had a very large industrial manufacturing strategy and people were poorer.
The key thing is having a balance and ensuring high employment in key areas. Germany for example manufacturing is suffering due to weak domestic and foreign demand, in which case you need the Services sector to pick up the slack. Its not rocket science, its economics which arguably can be more complex at times as higher order multi variate problem compared to rocket science.
40% of British labour costs are tax There is a bit of scope for lightening the burden.
@@conconmc The thing is rocket science is *science*, with scientific theories. Economics is a bunch of personally held ideals, unsupported by strong evidence, with little predictive power.
I was a Universty academic and was called in by the head of a top business school to vet and _viva_ his PhD student as she was doing complex maths which overturned his pet mathematical model. Much to the head's chagrin I found her maths to be faultless, and her arguments, based on her stated assumptions, led to her conclusion. She got her PhD.
The problem with economics is the assumptions, as they reduce the domain of discourse.
And the ASI was one of the think tanks which backed deindustrialising Britain
@@frogandspanner - Interesting, major advances invariably result from extraordinary individuals vision and will power, and these individuals are rarely economists, academics, bureaucrats or politicians
Absolutely tragic. A world leader in innovation and industry reduced to impoverishment.
You ceded an empire. What did you expect?
Once Great Britain Ha?
@@Drunken_Master Empire has got nothing to do with Birmingham's problems.
@@redwine2664 Umm yes? It was...
@@DFzonefd but for whom? Qui Bono? Not the working class?
You should mention the crippling taxes on investment - in the late 1960s these taxes went up to insane levels.
That's got nothing to do with what's happened to Birmingham. The ASI's open borders' policy is far closer to the reason
Hold on a second, if you invested in GB in that time period, you had to pay a tax based on how much money you invested? If yes, WTF?????
@@babayaga6376 LOL what exactly has any of these claims got to do with the fact that since 1979 the ASI and IEA have dominated policy making? They're literally lying about what's happened and pretending like they've had no influence these last 45 years. This is how we know an ideology has reached its end point
The West Midlands suffered more than anywhere else in Britain from the process of deindustrailization, in particular the decline of the motor industry.
Ain't it the truth
the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act removed the incentive for local councils to permit building infrastructure. The country is run by Oxbridge graduates who pay no price for being wrong. HR is the only growth profession in the UK due to one set of Oxbridge grads bringing in thousands of regulations in relation to employment. Now Isobel an Oxbridge arts graduate gets paid 250k a year to ensure companies have the right quota of sexual preferences and colours employed.
Local councils were prohibited from building social housing by Thatcher. This didn't help either the building industry, nor did it help 21st century Britain, now suffering a crippling housing shortage
With the most expensive electricity in the world British industry is only going to continue to close.
Its sad to watch this and know it mostly falls on deaf ears in Britain
We have had 45 years of neolib economic disaster,so why is it Atlees fault?
Exactly 14 Tory years and UK is slum.
They've got to blame someone🤷♂.
@@roberthorseman7432it was Attlee, in 1947, who allowed all commonwealth citizens to have the right to come to the UK. At the time, 600 million people. What an idiot. Look around you, and see the results. A disaster for us native Brits.
Did you watch and listen to the video? Government intervention was the error. The article is suggesting if Atlee and co didn't get involved, the economy might be stronger today. Because the government's pre Thatcher were propping up loss leading business (ie the coal industry) then that capital could best have been allocated elsewhere.
Unfortunately the neo liberalism of the last 45 years has just been too little too late.
You failed to explain why e.g. the Labour government under Harold Wilson considered the growth of Birmingham as "threatening". Environmental objections had not been thought as important in the early 1970s. I think it is not wrong if a government cares about threats, but the error might have been that they saw a threat where actually was happiness.
Omg, grinding my teeth to paste. You are definitely right in the matter of government suppressing the organic movement within the country of capital and labour. There is nothing useful I can add except the observation of a sympathetic outsider that heartened me on my only visit to your islands, May/June 2016: a sense of stifled potential within the people generally, and that potential is considerable in breadth and depth.
May our countries re-establish the barriers that check and deny an overbearing onerous and deceitful bureaucracy.
Anyone who spends 10min in town will be able to answer most of these questions lmao
And it's not so much about why but how
That's NOT the root cause... Watch the video mush.
@@vlad.the.impaler. Britain's wealth was built by having those people within the empire, but prohibited from trading with other European powers. The opening up and loss of the colonies destroyed Britain's markets. So you're right for the wrong reasons.
To many locals on benefits 😂if it wasn't for the foreigners there wouldn't be a country
no mention of the poor labour relations in the 1970s which did a lot to accelerate the decline of the British-owned car industry largely based in the Birmingham area
That was a symptom of the failed interventionism.
@@stevenfarrall3942 Rolls Royce was a good example of govt interventionism in the 1970s. How come they got it wrong at British Leyland?
@@erongi233 Not really. RR got into trouble because of a priori failed government interventionism and bad money.
@stevenfarrall3942 total rubbish. I worked as an auditor of RR in 1970s. They went bust,laddie, because they had contract with Lockheed at too low a price on their RB211.not really!
@@erongi233 I agree with your assertion regarding the RB211 costs being out of control and the connected issue with the Lockheed contract. If re-read my comment I say 'a priori failed government interventionism and bad money. By 1971 the inflationary consequences of the welfare state and other factors were wreaking their havoc on industries like aerospace. This was making GBP weaker and leading to a lot of problems for firms trading internationally (ss the ASI video also states). Money is a nationalised commodity in the UK - the post WW2 labour government nationalised the BofE - enabling the massive over-production of money and credit. This tends to make manufacturing of things like aircraft harder to do profitably because of the long lead times, whereas it makes the production of goods for immediate consumption easier. It was a priori government failure that destabilised RR. Oh and FYI I did a dissertation on the RR failure for my business studies course.
Ronald Regan summed it up, the most frightening words ever spoken "I'm from the government, I'm here to help you"
The irony of the head of government saying that seems to have been lost on him and everyone who quotes him.
@@RW-nr6bhIndeed it does
The British government taxed its economy to death starting in 1944. The taxation of wages, goods, services and the tools of production will inevitably destroy an economy. Trying to run a welfare state with such a tax system is suicidal.
Neither left nor right acknowledge this. We are now approaching the end of the doom loop.
The truth is the diametric opposite: we slashed taxes in the 80s and now the country is at the mercy of the private interests that the ASI represents. You also left out what deregulating the banks left us with
@@Phil-n7c
Taxes were not slashed in the 80s. The burden was transferred to VAT, probably the most damaging and inefficient tax ever devised.
@@physiocrat7143 That's what Thatcher is most famous for: cutting taxes on the well off. You can lie or deny it all you want, that's what happened.
The reason VAT was created and increased by the Tories was to transfer more of the tax burden to the less well off
You guys can cry and wail all you want, you just can't accept that neoliberalism has been a disaster and that it's coming to an end
Britain wrecked itself fighting wars it couldn’t afford in the first half of the 20th century
America is doing the same thing now
Col Macgregor Ret
Post WW2, economic growth was the greatest in the 1950s-60s, when taxes were at their highest.
As the Scandinavian economies prove, high taxation doesn't, by itself, cause economic stagnation.
What matters is governance.
The UK failed to successfully transition from relying on its empire to becoming self-reliant.
Appalachia suffered a similar fate due to people never being allowed to diversify the economy or build personal wealth once the government entangled coal companies took hold
I don't deny that Attlee's mass nationalisation program and industrial strategy were very flawed policies, but Thatcherism didn't work! It lead to asset stripping and look at the end results - mass outsourcing of Britain's industries, over reliance on other countries for imports, a misbalanced economy with it skewed towards financial services(which is of questionable economic benefit).
As the video shows, most of the damage was done before the Thatcher reforms and monetary squeeze to kill inflation. Unions were out of control. As for asset stripping, I don't think there were many assets worth taking by the end of the 1970s.
Manufacturing output actually grew under Thatcher, the issue was the reduction of labour intensification during that period, which happened in every other country in the world too.
..didn't thatcher allow council house renters buy their rented homes and be property owners for the first time in centuries?
Manufacturing as a percentage of the economy shrank by more in the early years of the 21st century than it did during the worldwide recession of the early 1980s (caused by the Iranian revolution).
@@Leah-ju8htThey ended up owned by landlords.
We need to concentrate on high quality high skilled manufacturing but the government has allowed mass low quality and unskilled labour, this is not going to end well is it.
While failing to tackle the benefits system or healthcare
I wonder what changed in Birmingham between 1960 and now.. its a real head scratcher..
The UK has been going 50% at best ever since WW2. No idea why but every cisris that comes up seems to last longer in the UK than in comparable countries?
Your just afraid to say it.
Britain made pretty much every country in their, ever so BRUTAL, empire independent, and went through 2 an entire world wars, that bankrupted the country. So, people from all of those places (a lot of whom were poor because of what Britain did in their land) came to Britain (some were invited) for better economic opportunity. I find it hilarious that so many of you focus on the “issue” of immigration, but never actually want to discuss WHY people migrated to Britain post WWII…
@@I_am_Jesus_though No, you're just afraid Jesus. Ever since you were on that cross
@@liamo8932 Maybe you're young or naive. Either way, I wouldn't mock God my friend.
So basically you're saying we should turn a blind eye to the destruction of what little natural area still survives. Yes, the industrial revolution created a lot of wealth, but on the back of huge amounts of environmental destruction, as well as worker exploitation. Your claim that workers of that period were well paid is just plain wrong, it was a time of children up chimneys and factory workers trudging to the mill in the early morn. We don't want to return to that type of exploitation for the sake if GDP and the enrichment of a small minority of the population.
Exactly my thinking. I am no socialist (but I am somewhat of a social-democrat), and it's possible that some of what he says is correct, but he seems to idealize a time when the "little people" suffered much more than they do today. There are things to repair. Lazy people shouldn't get unemployment money. However, sick people who can't work should. It's complicated. It's not black and white.
Well this is The Adam Smith Institute
If the Empire was successfully reformed in the 19-th century to integrate the disjointed economies across the globe in a common market, Britain could have wielded the Great War from a much better position, avoiding the mounting costs of maintaining overseas territories and keep its status as net creditor and industrial leader.
But alas, that would have required forethought and some modicum of contrition. Instead, we got India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel and several other wars over the boundaries we imposed.
How about not getting involved a stupid war centred in the Balkens
@@Sean-p3o The Balkans are closer to some parts of the UK than some parts of the UK are to each other. Stopping people from thinking you can murder your way over other people's borders is why you've never had to go to war.
Probably something to do with the demographics changing decade upon decade since the 60s.
To be fair, those demographics came here because Birmingham had a lot of work to offer in factories. Most of the people who are unemployed and problematic in this city today would have had good honest jobs making stuff 60 years ago.
The demographics have a lot to do with it, no city can afford to pay men to attend mosques.
We go to the mosque for free. Try it
@ponderingspirit that's not what he means.
He means the gov are paying older muslims on thr dole that don't work and just go to a mosque. Try read the statement properly
@@ponderingspirit Yes, instead of working on Fridays...
@@I_am_Jesus_though What data shows they're on the dole? And how do you know which mosque they're attending? let alone their whereabouts. If they're older, they're of pensioable age. What's the problem? You weird little racists.
@@I_am_Jesus_though He means that a huge proportion (not just the old) do not work and draw welfare instead
Interesting. Same thing happening now, worldwide maybe, with extreme left governments' mandates for EVs which are crushing vehicle industries.
EVs are so good that the government has to give them tax breaks and ultimiately mandate them.
What does the V in EV stand for?
@@LODOWICKMUGGLETON Vehicle industries are doing fine. Just the Western and Japanese one are making archaic overpriced crap that no-one wants to buy.
Britain wrecked itself fighting wars it couldn’t afford in the first half of the 20th Century
America is doing the same thing this century
Col Macgregor Ret
True. Especially it should not have been involved in WWI. It should have allowed Austria to fight its war against Serbia on its own. Britain found a chance to fight Germany and at the end it lost the empire.
If America today or Britain in the 1900s can't afford wars then nobody can. And yet they happen. Why is that?
@@georgerj2419 Britain joined WW1 to protect Belgium. British foreign policy has always recognised that a mainland Europe dominated by one country is bad for Britain.
@@nigelgarrett7970100% agree. But that still begs the question, should we have sacrificed so much.
@@nigelgarrett7970How did that work out as Germany (even a divided country) remained the strongest country on the continent- especially economically
Belgium was a pretext and excuse for those that wanted war
Britain sent an army over that wasn’t designed to fight against large continental armies
We should have told the Germans that we would keep them out of the Channel and North Sea if they had designs on channel ports.
who ran Birmingham council during its decline?
Labour council
Conservatives Govt seriously under funding it between 2010-2022 councils took a 50% cut in funding. Also birmingham council lost a law suit which costed millions and played a major role in the bankruptcy. But Look at what the Conservatives did to croydon and thurrock councils. With thurrock they took out a massive loan for some risky investments and it backfired fucking bankrupted them. 😂😂
They bankrupted my council Wiltshire which they've ran for the last 100 years fuck knows how they managed that because they dont invest here the economic illiterate twats dont.
@@ellismeah8110 Really? Has it always been Labour? Bosworth and Whitby beg to differ.
Brilliant. Birmingham was allowed to 'develop' aaccording to the 'schedule of history' - roughly 'I have seen the future and it works'. This tyoe of prophecy is still with us - so-called 'Climate Change' is its latest manifestation. Birmingham demolished its centre, and surrounded it with ring roads, thus ensuring a complete separation of city and suburb, with dire social consequences.
The Rootes Group of car makers was destroyed by government intervention when it was forced to move to Linwood, Scotland. The local labour force had no experience of car production, and went on semi-permanent strike, despite wages being nearly twice the local level. Together with a strike in its Acton factory, Rootes failed shortly afterward.
As with today's governments, anything other than the real problems facing people were considered, whilst dream state after dream state took up the time and tax money which should have been spent elsewhere.
This is a rather simplistic picture. Many factors were mot mentioned, the role that the Empire played, the mass exodus from Ireland to England during the Famine, remember this was "internal" migration, since Ireland was part of the UK at the time. Many Irish, like my great great grandparents, settled in Liverpool, many others in Birmingham.
As for the Green Belt, this was demanded by towns like my own, Bromsgrove, which have already seen the loss of areas like Northfield and part of Rubery, absorbed into the city as 'new' suburbs.
We had no wish to become part of the conurbation, as the former Worcestershire towns of Dudley and Stourbridge had been.
Thanks to the Green Belt, we retain our character and history and attract millionaire residents to areas like Barnt Green, home of professional footballers and music stars like UB40
An interesting insight into my home town.
However, I must correct you on something;- "Birmingham has more canals than Venice". In the early 80's, when the city hit rock bottom and looked like a right dump, a group of staff at the city's economic development unit brainstormed ideas to change people's perceptions of the city and came up with some things which became urban myths; the one about canals being one, "Birmingham has more acres of parkland than any other city in Europe" and "Birmingham has more trees than Paris" being two more.
They deliberately dropped these into casual conversations with people like journalists and elected council members and soon they had spread like wildfire across the city and beyond.
They are eminently believable because Birmingham does have a lot of canals, parks and trees. They were picked up and repeated by Brummies desperate to see something positive in their decaying city. I was one of them.
This was told to the BBC journalist and radio presented, Ed Doolan in a radio interview with someone who worked at the EDU.
Good video -but would have been great if the roll of central banks, lack of financial investment and fiat currency were included in the reasons for decline.
I have learnt so much from this report. Birmingham’s decline is the result of government folly, from 1945 onwards. I can hardly believe the Distribution of Industry Act was passed in 1945.
A lot of people in Britain have always been prejudiced against B'ham and the rest of the Midlands.
This is Atlas Shrugged level conspiracy like the novel.
GOD I AGREE WITH THIS. The treasury spreadsheets have wrecked this country. Let people and business choose their paths rather than trying to impose a politburo centrally planned strategy. its so obvious.
The country is completely dominated by the financial and corporate interests that the ASI represents. If the treasury has been serving anyone it's them.
@@Phil-n7c nonsense, the ASI do not represent financial and corporate interests anymore than they represent small business and workers. Anyone who wants economic freedom is represented by ASI. You my friend are part of the 'useful idiots' who keep the corporate overlords in the comfort they've become accustomed to. These people fear free markets and competition more than anything as they depend dearly on government regulation and handouts from labour and the tories to keep them afloat. The opposite of what ASI stands for entirely.
@@Phil-n7c Rubbish. Utter rubbish.
Yup. Laissez-faire works. Governments and bureaucrats don't.
So how come 40 years of the Adam Smith Institute getting its way hasn't reversed all this?
For an advanced economy you need skilled people to invent, develop and manufacture innovative products.
As an engineering graduate in the early 1980's I experienced the consequences of the Tory deskilling of the engineering industry. Watering down engineering degrees to encourage young people onto courses many didn't want to do - better on and engineering degree than down at the job centre and forced to apply for menial jobs because you failed (or perhaps got 1) A level . Any engineer (particularly ones in the bigger companies) will have experienced useless undergraduates and graduates who weren't interested in engineering and knew little. Some of them openly bragging they would never have to pay off their student loan because they would never earn enough.
As the video says, this country can't compete on low cost manufacturing. The problem is we can't compete on high value manufacturing either. With the last crop of decent engineers graduating in the 1970's and early 1980' now heading for retirement there are simply not enough clever young people in engineering. That isn't going to change any time soon, if at all.
Cheap energy and relaxed planning rules wont change that either.
You fail to mention that Conservative governments between 1951-64 were just as determined to force industry to relocate away from the Midlands to e.g. Liverpool and Scotland. You also make no reference to the economic impact of New Towns and why some succeeded and others failed. Finally, the Conservative Government of 1970-74 began with a free market strategy but, abandoned them following the rescues of Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. It was the failures of the Heath government that propelled Margaret Thatcher to become leader of the Conservative party in 1975 with all that followed from 1979. Your analysis whilst interesting needs to be more nuanced and accurate,
Do you think there was no industry in Scotland? The Scottish steel industry was destroyed by governments who could not see beyond the Tweed. Glasgow had the largest concentration of railway works in the country, some years more ships were launched on the Clyde than the rest of the world put together. What were thriving concerns, were bought up by English companies ie. dairies, insurance companies etc., closed down & head offices relocated south.
Rather unconvincing attempt to shift the blame for deindustrialisation away from Thatcherism and free market dogma. British industry paid the price for being the first country to industrialise (no competition in world markets) and then struggling to modernise with outdated institutions and lack of investment. Birmingham is a classic case with its small workshop based industries. The impact of the world wars particularly the tight constraints on investment after WW2 should not be underestimated. The post war attempts to modernise and rationalise industries through mergers were too little too late. The deliberate policy of deindustrialisation of the 1980s onwards with the focus shifting to services and particularly the finance sector (which formed the social base of Thatcherism) glossed this failure over for a while particularly with North Sea Oil revenues but has had disastrous long term consequences
Politicians went from allowing growth to managing growth ala James Burnham.
Absolute utter bollocks. The council went bust for two reasons
A a disastrous equal pay judgement that was the largest ever in Europe
B the massive cuts from central government whilst paasing on responsibility for many aervices particularly housing
While your point about the equal pay judgment is correct, it also fits with the broader trend of pay being determined by government, specifically the minimum wage, instead of market forces.
For context, the judge in the case decided that dinner ladies should be paid the same as bin men. That these two jobs are completely different is apparently irrelevant.
So I think this is consistent with the video’s thesis that government interventions have wrecked Birmingham.
The trouble is heavy industry is a major pollutant, we need a system that is productive without being environmentally devastating.
Brum really peaked during ww2, aircraft manufacturing, castle Bromwich, BSA, Britain Small arms, leading to British car and motorcycle manufacturers, like my first Car, Morris 1100, happy days, when Chelmsley Wood was still green belt.
If she didnt take over we could of been a powerhouse still but we seem to be falling on the economical ladder
Stalin would be proud of the U.K. State interference
And was not Thatcher proud at the way important state assets were (under)sold to her mates in The City?
Stalin was shocked when Attlee sold him jet engines 'not to be used for the military'. It was not long before a Russian jet engine similar to the one sold was in the MIG 15 killing UN soldiers during the Korean war.
Every country that embraces neoliberal economic policies always ends up with the death of highly productive manufacturing industries, replaced by a hyper-financialized economy driven by asset price speculation and fueled by debt leverage. (Note: "Asset" usually refers to real estate and company stocks). This always leads to a situation where economic wealth is concentrated in a handful of locations while the rest of the country stagnates, if not degrades. A two-speed economy where the capitol is opulent while the districts are barely alive.
Many argue that the neoliberal economy espouses deregulation. What they leave out is that only the finance industry is deregulated. Everything else is regulated to death! The City of London is the perfect example...
But why will not the likes of Liz and her band of right wing nuts not admit that what they call 'Red Tape', is Heath and Safety rules that help to protect working people?
Funny, how in almost all videos about the decline of British industry there will be a clip of an Austin/Morris 1100 or 1300😂🤣
not a mention of the post war consensus?
We smashed the post war consensus in the 80s. Are you seriously arguing that policies abandoned 45 years ago are to blame? The ASI just can't face up to what they've done to this country
@@Phil-n7c no not at all, it would have given more context to the film.
When an economist without detailed knowledge of the subject should not be allowed to give advice. This is why teaching economics should be radically changed by infusing with history, tech, and sociology.
We sub contracted manufacturing overseas. Those countries got rich. We stagnated, with gdp bolstered by London money markets.
Post Brexit has just doubled down on decline - no one wants to use the city anymore. New listings are going overseas. Intellectual property the same. What's left?
Thatcher was right about being more productive on the world scale but she failed as she had no plan on how to employ those unemployed by her policies and beating the unions, the people were abandoned unless you lived in the south and south west. There was little investment in new manufacturing industries to employ the masses unless it came from inward investment like Nissan, Honda etc. Triumph motorcycles and Land Rover proved how it could be done to some degree but it didn't happen often enough thanks to inept governments.
Strange that they refer to the Labour Government being responsible but slip by that the polices that he criticises (noting that UK coal industry was at the forefront of the industries productivity in the 50s not an industry in decline until the mid 60s) were not only continued but taken much further by the Conservative Governments of Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Heath. Also bypasses that not having meaningful energy, industrial and transport policy in the UK for the last 40 years has not lead to an industrial renaissance and only need look to the water industry to see what happens when environmental legislation is nolonger enforced.
Cheap energy! But not a mention of why it isn't, nor the delusions that underpin why it isn't.
Mercia was more productive than Wessex, thats what was up.
Is there even a single party in this country that recognises the potential for facilitating rather than directing high value added manufacturing in this country?
Excellent video thanks - reminding everyone that de-industrialisation and decline are not party-specific phenomena
The video begins by asserting that Britain’s decline began in the 1870s but asserts that the cause of the decline was Clement Atlee’s policies post 1945? What am I missing here?
I know it bad but at least we have thousands of kabab shops.
What an interesting video, and extremely thought provoking. Of course it is 19 minutes of someone's understanding of what is destroying my home, Birmingham. In 1969 we were shipped out to Redditch to begin a new life with the movement of my firm and job. The movement was very well planned and gave me my wife and I children a new life from the slums of Birmingham to a tree covered Redditch, heaven.
But of course forced removing due to financial poverty is a devastating process, and this video made light of migration.
It is true I am afraid that successive government's and their narrow view of their own idealism that has exasperated the decline of Britain's manufacturing. The nightmares of union dominance and managerial inability to find common ground, or take on unreasonable union demands, again exasperated a real desire to improve and further industrialisation.
At 74 I can look back at a life of being a young communist, a socialist, a liberal, a Conservative and now....nothing. No one is better or worse for deindustrialisation, we all found was individually to achieve it. Good video tho. Alan
Immigration killed Birmingham.
And the ASI are total open borders
Deindustrialisation is what killed Birmingham, same as most of the North. Immigration hasn't exactly helped but it is not the main reason we are in this mess. The UK has been in decline since WW2.
@@cyborgbadger1015 The UK created Concorde in the post war era. And the internet and the world wide web. And many other innovations. It's ideological twaddle about "since WW2 - the post war era was literally called the "golden age of capitalism"
@@Phil-n7c The UK created Concorde - in collaboration with the French (that's why there's an extra 'e'). The internet was created in America (ARPANET). And the WWW was created by a Briton - working in Switzerland.
@@nigelgarrett7970 That's not true, the origin of the internet lies in packet switching which was invented by a British man in London working for the Royal Mail.
Correct, Concorde was a joint endeavour with the French using public investment in both countries. An incredible achievement which we note the free marketeers have been unable to replicate.
The swinging sixties were also "decline" were they? Britain is only one of two net exporters of music globally. British football the most popular anywhere?
Who cares where Berners-Lee was working? This country's record on innovation is second to none including in the post war era. You're just regurgitating the same old ideological nonsense now the latest Right wing idea has failed even on its own terms
Was constraining Birmingham's growth a Labour Party manifesto pledge?
Wokeness has been around for centuries.
Is it not telling how, even if many have no understanding of the true history of Woke, the Tory right continue to over-use the term?
The argument put forward in this video is a classic example of deciding in advance that something is the case and then presenting every fact that supports it in the most simplistic way possible, whilst conveniently ignoring anything which doesn't. So Foxes Mints were unable to build a factory in the 1940s. By the 1980s, Leicester's growth had slowed. Well there you are, what more do you need to know? The ASI is a well known right-wing think tank. So by definition every single thing the Attlee government did must have been a mistake. That has to be the starting point for any analysis.
you forgot the BSA group 1 in 4 motorcycles where once a BSA and cadburys at Bourneville where i went to school
I'm not gonna argue with you on the financial merits of what you say, because I'm no economist. But here's a question: given that you preach in favor of an unregulated industry with weaker/no worker unions etc. - I assume you'll agree to be the first in line for that hard-labour manufacturing job for £2/hour. Right?
If the economy is "doing well" and 99% of the people don't feel it - the economy is not doing well. You seem to yearn for a time when the gap between the few rich and the many poor was massive (much more than today), when most Brits couldn't afford to see a doctor, when most Brits lived in horrible sanitary conditions. What for? Who's going to enjoy that "booming economy"?
Let's face it: manufacturing jobs have left the West because people don't want to work like slaves and earn very little, and because in the West they can currently afford it. If you want to compete with China, you have to have these Apple factory-cities where so many people committed suicide that the management put nets underneath the windows to prevent people from jumping to their death. Again, I have to assume you'll be the first to volunteer to work in these conditions.
The British have always loved asking gov to intervene in anything and everything, then moan when they mess it up...
really interesting and informative video. as someone who has lived through many of the changes to birmingham, coventry and liecester over many it explains mush of the hidden background to my experiences, some political bias comes through though.
This report was an excellent overview and analysis of UK industrial policies over the decades. Thankfully you have moved past the Thatcher bashing explanations to hit upon mure depressing issues like govrernment intervention and a belief that the government knows whats best. Atllee and Wilson were besotted with state intervention which ultimately meant endless taxpayer support for uneconomic behemoths. Look at how the NHS contines as a failing enterprise to this day. It is a bottomless pit. Well done!
"...Britain's success"... in 18th/19th century, industrialisation in response to "...economic and social conditions..." - a rose-tinted travesty of the truth. As if the average mill & factory-owners cared a hoot for the desperate conditions his workers slaved under or pertained previously. It was only embarrassment & religiously-inspired guilt, coupled with employee "combination" & rage, which mitigated the worst of industrialisation's consequences. And the need for modest employee literacy/basic skills & trainability. An employee having been expensively trained was a wasted asset without improvements in health. Employer benevolence was the exception.. "...High wages..." we are told, a consequence of such benevolence.. No, just a transitional blip from pre- to post-industrial eras, supply/demand transient anomalies. Low regulation in A.S.I.'s preferred regime is about zero-hours contracts, 60+ hour weeks American/Chinese style, declining Health & Safety provision/inspection/paid holidays, a race to the bottom. Only when the NHS is replaced with expensive USA-style health insurance will they be happy. Thatcher's "golden era" was all about a Reaganomic "trickle-down" illusion, now comprehensively debunked with excruciating income-gap widening due to the employee/employer power imbalance the A.S.I. so favours. AT least German capitalists have been prepared to invest long-term, which was the bedrock of their success outstripping us. Now Chinese government direction of investment/industry seems at odds with A.S.I. 's core nostrums
yes because before that they're lives were so fantastic lol. Absolute nonsense.
@@jamie59685 Did I say that ? No. If you think those mill/factory owners were typically philanthropists ... as well as your Port Sunlight, Bournville village etc the vast majority were in for exploiting nimble-fingered kids, subjecting women workers to "phossy-jaw" (Google it) & all the rest. No workers' comp for them, outrageously long hours/hideous conditions too.
Didn't only destroy Birmingham he destroyed Britain.
It seems that the ASI would champion the idea of mass migration leading to places suffering more congestion, shortage of public services, overcrowding etc while other areas end up as dilapidated ghost towns. Isn't a simple solution provide incentives to redistribute opportunities around the country? Also people get attached to their local area.
I moved away from my local area to London for opportunities, but it meant severing ties to family, friends and areas I knew and loved. In time I got to know others in the area but London is full of people feeling lonely and isolated as they have moved there and it is relatively hard to get to know people there compared to other places.
Have you guys ever read Adam Smith?
But yet - they still come in large numbers - especially when they are treated better than the indigenous population
To be clear, why do you repeat should such half-truths and lies? For are not the right-wing just playing the race hate card?
by whom.?
Attlee was a labour politician so of course he destroyed Birmingham, the labour party destroys everything it touches
Have you forgotten how fast Liz and her band of right wing nuts nearly sank the country?
Britain had a monopoly on Technology, which others for a while could not compete, along with a commonwealth of countries forced into (mercantile) supplying cheap raw materials for Britain to turn into expensive goods ( Thomas Mun, 'buy cheap by using the power of wealth, sell them dear by monopoly and again wealth = power to manipulate governments and kingdoms).
Let's build anything anywhere without any Red tape! No labour rights, no tax! Let capitalism rip..
UK look like SA after APRTHEID
The jobs went to the EU and then China as cost grew business went bust and the UK deindustrialized,
ugh, not another red tape and regulations are why our industry died.
It should have been left to grow organically, and not have ideological restraints put on it. Ideology tends to be illogical. I remember in the late 60's and into the 70's, there seemed to be never ending strikes and one wonders if the strikes and joining the EC in 1972, was a two pincer attack on the country.
Yes, because leaving the EU is turning out to be such a great success for the UK...
I am surprised to hear Attlee being a cause in the UK's decline.
The decline started in the 1880's and became immeasurably worse from about 1970 leading eventually to Thatcher
He was responsible for serious social/educational reform and had a good attitude to the Empire.
Bearing in mind he had power over a bankrupt nation aided and abetted by Lend Lease ; as of now I think well of him.
I lived and worked in Coventry from the 50's to 2000.
I cant see the disaster that has occurred had much to do with Attlee
The doom loop was created in 1944 with a welfare state funded by taxes on wages, goods and services
@@physiocrat7143Taxes don't fund government spending. If they did budget deficits wouldn't be possible.
@@GonzoTehGreat
MMT theory. Correct but tax is needed to prevent runaway inflation. Wrong sort of taxes have been ruinous
@@physiocrat7143 Agreed, but it's questionable if ALL post WW2 UK taxes were "ruinous". Some certainly were and it's also true that an economy can thrive with low taxes (e.g. Hong Kong), but taxation itself isn't problematic.
The problem is poor governance.
When it was created, the UK welfare state was designed as a "(helping) hand up", but over successive decades, to secure votes from an aging population, politicians have turned it into a "hand out". Meanwhile, over the same period, taxes have fallen. Clearly, taxation isn't the issue.
@GonzoTehGreat
HK thrived on the revenue from the sale of 40 year leases.
Taxation is very much the issue. If you tax windows then you will have bricked up windows. If you tax honest work and trade, you can work out what the results will be
Love the frank admission early on that coal was crucial in the wealth of industry in the UK... so we can reopen the pits now then? Wonderful 👍
yeah, in the 1700s it was, not so much nowadays.
Honestly, although its issues, based on numbeo quality of life index, Birmingham is still better than London and a bit more than Manchester.
And now its a shining example of the future of this country. Absolutely nothing
once that london gets all it needs and then all it doesn't need will the government look to other places, but to just think about improving those areas before heading to london again for another railway.
We fought the wrong side in WW2
So, suppose wages were so high in Victoriana. Why did the Rowntree Commission state otherwise concerning malnutrition ( if wages were so high, then why was malnutrition so high?) and early death ( also due to literally being worked to death) of the masses in such industrial cities as Birmingham? Please don't insult the hundreds of thousands of early deaths due to slum housing, with little or no sanitation, back to back with no airflow, all within walking distance of a factory, built on the remaining bits of land by builders using off the peg designs for a minimum cost build to the detriment of the workers being exploited by their new landlords as well as at the workplace with 12 to 24-hour shifts (when large orders came in then lays offs with no income when markets crashed) 7 days a week including children.
Rewriting history makes your arguments appear weak concerning 'free trade' (that has never existed as Adma Smith's examples were based on two sides being of equal power with no other demands, being honest and never using cartels, wealth or leverage of the law to exploit, his war against mercantilism was indeed needed and brave, but his ideal has never been met, and mercantilism continues to this day with Corporates replacing the likes of Thomas Mun ( 'sell them dear') and his former East India Company.
🇬🇧 👍🏽 November 2024
What a fantastic essay!
Manchester and Leeds adapted, both cities are visually booming! Leeds south bank is the largest redevelopment project in Europe
I grew up in Sheffield. It's a ghost town. 👻🏙️
Once the steel works went the decline was terminal. They tried to revitalise the city by building pointless things like Meadow hall which destroyed the city centre. They spent 5 years building a tram system which exacerbated the decline because no one could get to their business!
I left 20 years ago and was glad to do so.
So long as you dont go out of the core central bits. Every large English city since the 2000s (perhaps 1980s in London) has followed the folly of american cities. Lavish money on making the few blocks of the centre look all new and shiny, and let the other 95% where most the population live and work go to rack and ruin.
They havent adapted, they just have massive funds spunked on them taken from everywhere else.
But that's the point of the piece, isn't it? The cities originally evolved and built themselves, now they have to be artificially enhanced by authority
Decades of Labour mismanagement
Was it always a Labour council?
There is some merit to the claim that Industrial Strategy and the strength of trade unions in maintaining liveable wages played a major part in downturn of the midlands economy.
I argue that there are other factors that weigh equally as significantly.
First, as pointed out in this video, the Black Country and surrounding areas were progenitors of scaling up of industrial capacity, driven by high labour costs and availability of local coal (energy) resources. Part of the fall can then be attributed to loss of competitive advantage once the benefits of first-to-market became less pronounced.
Second, since improved planning is one of the conclusions of this piece, while railway mania accelerated building of infrastructure increasing profitability, the lack of long-term thinking/planning has been a major cause of current infrastructure issues. Between the end of WW2 and the 1970s, Herbert Manzoni's plan was to alleviate mobility issues identified post-industrialisation. At the time, the answer was to transform Birmingham into a car-centric city. This had the effect of driving down footfall within Birmingham, denying the city the opportunity to diversify away from industry.
Overlooking other factors for brevity, my general conclusions are:
1 While planning reform is a positive step, a centralised vision must be created to prevent short-term solutions. For example, improved public transport options will lower dependency on cars, improve mobility and increase footfall
2 While the lowering of energy costs would be beneficial to industry in the region, we have to consider other competitive disadvantages, such as wages and productivity relative to competitor nations. Coupled with that, if the aim is to increase exports, we must also consider tariffs and non-trade barriers - what are we making and who are we making it for?
The ASI are fanatics who solely care about PRIVATE interests. Of course they'd attack trade unions. The little fellas who are so concerned with "freedom" really want the freedom to order everyone else around
Their saying (Labour) " the man from the ministry knows best" sums up socialist attitudes.
Didnt your organisation also promote the "free market and privatisation"
Yup. A litany of government and bureaucratic failure.
Well said 👍
Turned out Britain's industrial competitive advantage was built around imperial trade routes.
This should be seen by every incoming government- UK has been paralysed for decades- we ended up making poor quality good by low skilled labour- now its bankers barbers and baristas- the government strategy should be cheap energy, skills training ( tax breaks for training - not useless degrees) bulldozer old brown field site, like touch regulation on these sites- and high quality medium rise housing for people and their families- then let the market evolve
You forgot to mention getting rid of punishing taxes.
The government should be a fair-play regulator, not an intervenor in the market. This is what happened during the Victorian era, when Britain excelled in industrialisation. Hopefully, people will vote to someone who comes up with more right aligned economic policies over the left socialist ideologies.
As the video points out, things were going wrong in the late 19th century.
There were two factors - the growing strength of trade unions, which almost always had a luddite attitude to new machinery and technology. Secondly, the state education system spent more and more money teaching useless knowledge rather than the know-how that a modern economy needs.
Working class people were not getting their fair share of the cake and were seduced by socialism. It started with the Inclosures of the 18th century and the Dark Satanic Mills, the Peterloo massacre, Chartist, etc.
The trade unions were what ensured the wealth workers created was actually spread around the community more. You guys know very well neoliberalism is coming to an end and you just can't accept it
Emphasis on invested in now we only invest in self destruction.
As ALWAYS, government intervention and socialist adjacent policies eventually kills everything off.
Are you trying to make me like Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee more? I hate Birmingham!