De-industrialisation in Britain

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to provide a general context for the more specialised chapters which follow. It is primarily concerned with manufacturing employment in Britain since the Second World War, although there is some discussion of industrial employment as a whole. We show how Britain has experienced an enormous reduction in manufacturing employment over the past thirty years — greater than in almost any other advanced capitalist country — and we consider various hypotheses which might explain this phenomenon. Three main hypotheses are identified which for convenience we label: the ‘Maturity Thesis’, the ‘Trade Specialisation Thesis’ and the ‘Failure Thesis’. All three hypotheses, it turns out, have considerable evidence in their favour and all three help to explain what has happened to manufacturing employment in Britain.