The British State, Governments and Manufacturing Decline

Abstract

The collapse of manufacturing in Britain since 1979 is the culmination of a more protracted decline. Most sectors of the economy have been hit by the post-1979 recession, but it is manufacturing industry which has been most severely affected. Indeed, the process of ‘de-industrialisation’ is peculiarly, some would say almost uniquely, a British problem (see Smith, 1984, p. 34). No other advanced industrialised nation has experienced the contraction in manufacturing employment and the falls in output that have afflicted the United Kingdom. Whilst most OECD countries have suffered a setback in industrial production in the 1980s, they have, none the less, maintained production levels well above those of the UK.