Abstract
When the dust had settled from the general election of 1997, it was possible for the very first time in modern British electoral history — or at least it was possible if you picked your route with care — to drive from Land’s End to John O’Groats without passing through a single constituency held by a Conservative MP, bar one. When all the election results were in, the one unavoidable blot of blue on your otherwise pink road map was an isolated Tory stronghold in the Yorkshire Dales. The isolation of that Ryedale constituency stood as stark testimony to the scale of the cull of Conservative MPs effected by the UK electorate in May 1997. Never since 1836 had the UK’s traditional governing party been so decimated and discarded. Never since 1945 had a Labour government come to power amid such excitement and with such promise. ‘Dilute that excitement with whatever doses of scepticism you feel appropriate’, Andrew Rawnsley told us as the results came tumbling in, and yet there was still ‘no question that on Friday morning Britain woke up a different country. It may be a trick of the light,’ he wrote, ‘but it feels like a younger country.’1
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Notes
L. P. Hartley, The Go Between, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1967, p. 1.
P. Armstrong, A. Glyn and J. Harrison, Capitalism since World War II: The Making and Break Up of the Great Boom, London, Fontana, 1991, pp. 167–8.
See for example, B. Supple, ‘British economic decline since 1945’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700, volume 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 318–46; and
S. Wilks, ‘Conservative governments and the economy 1979–97’, Political Studies, vol. XLV, 1997, pp. 689–703.
Michael Barratt Brown, What Really Happened to the Coal Industry, Nottingham, Institute for Workers Control, 1972, p. 5.
The term given to the systems of semi-automated mass production that spread through consumer industries in the UK after 1945, and first pioneered by Henry Ford. On this, see D. Coates, Running the Country, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1995, pp. 23–6.
G. Rhys, ‘The transformation of the motor industry in the UK’, in R. Turner (ed.), The British Economy in Transition, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 147.
R. Church, The Rise and Decline of the British Motor Industry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 54.
P. Gregg and J. Wadsworth, ‘Economic inactivity’, in their The State of Working Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 56.
D. Coates, ‘UK under-performance: claim and reality’, in D. Coates and J. Hillard (eds), UK Economic Decline: Key Texts, Hemel Hempstead, Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995, p. 7. The bulk of those excluded by this process were male workers in the second half of their working career. Job creation in the UK between 1979 and 1997 was heavily skewed towards part-time work so that overall the numbers of hours worked in the UK economy actually fell: from 850 million a year in 1984 to 780 million in 1994.
The 1960 figures, in 1998 US dollars (using data based on purchasing power parity exchange rates) were 4,672 for Japan, 9,842 for West Germany, 8,546 for France, 7,286 for Italy and 10,503 for the UK. The 1998 figures were 24,170 for Japan, 24,868 for the western part of Germany, 22,255 for France, 22,234 for Italy and 21,502 for the UK. By the same token, hourly wage rates in manufacturing in the UK were on average 81% of those prevalent in the US. The equivalent figure for Germany was 132%, for France 87% and for Italy 96% (L. Mishel, J. Bernstein and J. Shmitt (eds), The State of Working America 2000–2001, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001, pp. 374, 381).
House of Commons Select Committee on Trade and Industry, Second Report, The Competitiveness of UK Manufacturing Industry, London, HMSO, 1994, p. 20. On the Government’s own figures that year, the UK had slipped to 17th in the international league table of per capita income (Competitiveness: Forging Ahead, Cmnd 2867, London, HMSO, 1994, p. 13.)
M. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, London, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 484–94.
W. Walker, ‘National innovation systems: Britain’, in R. Nelson (ed.), National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 160–1.
For a full discussion of the academic literature on this, see D. Coates, The Question of UK Decline, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
For an accessible extract from the report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Overseas Trade, see D. Coates and J. Hillard (eds), The Economic Revival of Modern Britain: The Debate between Left and Right, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1987, pp. 183–203.
The later Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report, addressing the controversy on the degree of UK underinvestment in machinery and equipment relative to key overseas competitors, insisted that ‘UK investment, excluding residential construction, has been lower than that of all our major competitors, except the United States… [this] persistently low level of investment, particularly in manufacturing, has resulted in a relatively low level of capital stock and equipment per worker. UK industry is much less capital-intensive than industry elsewhere.’ The report recorded the percentages of GDP going to investment in manufacturing and equipment between 1960 and 1993 in the UK as 8.4%, but as 12.4% in Japan, 9.8% in Italy, 8.7% in Germany, 8.9% in France and 7.6% in the US. (IPPR, Promoting Prosperity: A Business Agenda for Britain, London, Vintage Books, 1997, pp. 25–7).
There is now a huge research literature on the underskilling of core workers in the UK economy prior to 1997, and on the associated deficiencies in both the education and training systems. For a fuller discussion, see D. Finegold and D. Soskice, ‘The failure of training in Britain: analysis and prescription’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 4(3), 1988, pp. 21–53;
D. H. Aldcroft, Education, Training and Economic Performance 1944–1990, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992;
D. Ashton and F. Green, Education, Training and the Global Economy, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1996; and
D. Coates, Models of Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000, pp. 107–20.
‘Although we have many world beating companies, average productivity levels in manufacturing have not yet risen to those of our major competitors…our productivity shortfall is less in services.’ DTI, Competitiveness: Helping Business to Win, p. 13. The DTI’s Competitiveness: Forging Ahead similarly spoke of ‘a significant gap [that] remains overall’ and of a ‘lag behind the US, Germany and France in some areas of service productivity, although the gap is less than in manufacturing’. Broadberry calculated the gap in output per employee in 1989 between the UK and the US as a staggering 77% in the manufacturing sector and 31.5% in the economy as a whole. The equivalent figures for the economy as a whole were, for Germany 16% and France 29% in 1989. He also found that this shortfall hadn’t changed much in the twentieth century (S. Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective 1850–1990, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 66, 52, 395).
House of Commons Select Committee on Trade and Industry, Competitiveness of UK Manufacturing Industry, 1994, p. 13.
For a fuller discussion of these, see D. Coates, ‘Labour Governments: old constraints and new parameters’, New Left Review 219, September/October 1996, pp. 62–77.
The basic structure of privilege at the top of society remained unchanged. On the structures of privilege inherited by New Labour, see J. Paxman, Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain? London, Michael Joseph, 1990;
J. Scott, Who Rules Britain? Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; and D. Coates, Running the Country.
S. Walby, Gender Transformations, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 27.
On this, see C. Creighton, ‘The rise and decline of the “male breadwinner family” in Britain’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 23, 1999, pp. 519–41. The wage gap between men and women was narrowing in the 1990s, but at 75% was still substantial. (Desai et al., ‘Gender and the labour market’, p. 176).
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
W. Hutton, The State We’re In, London, Cape, 1994, p. 23.
W. Hutton, The State to Come, London, Vintage Books, 1997, p. 9.
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Coates, D. (2005). The Legacy. In: Prolonged Labour. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509085_1
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