[gizajob]

Part of the issue with the UK being bad at manufacturing was (ok it’s a cliche but I’ll say it anyway) that Thatcherism in not wanting to deal with the unions and the social powers they represent, defeated socialism by destroying the work and replacing industry with nothing. There’s no reason the UK couldn’t manufacture ships or precision engineering or steel - it was set up for exactly that. But doing so involves negotiating with unionised power, who vote Labour, and it was a quicker solution to merely destroy and keep destroying social cohesion and the unions around it – “there’s no such thing as society” – by destroying and defunding the work. The London-based finance powers also lost interest in funding industrial production and its workers alongside when moving money around and corruption can be done from the office in London without having to negotiate with union bosses and their insistence for a bigger piece of the pie (that they’re baking).

If you look at somewhere like South Korea, who 60 years ago had no major engineering or shipbuilding, the UK could be leagues ahead of them. The difference is that the South Koreans had the appetite and impetus to do it, whereas in the UK the government and finance planners had the exact opposite impetus.