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| British industry isn’t dead. It just needs new tools with a cutting edge | British industry isn’t dead. It just needs new tools with a cutting edge |
| (about 2 months later) | |
| Sat 25 Nov 2017 06.00 GMT | |
| Last modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017 09.18 GMT | |
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| Britain isn’t yet an industrial wasteland. The traveller on the train from St Pancras to Yorkshire can certainly see evidence of abandoned production: the water-filled hollows that once supplied Bedfordshire’s brickworks with clay; the distant outlines of the great airship sheds at Cardington, built when that mode of travel had a future; the eroding embankment of a mineral line that once took ironstone from the Northampton quarries to the smelters at Scunthorpe. | Britain isn’t yet an industrial wasteland. The traveller on the train from St Pancras to Yorkshire can certainly see evidence of abandoned production: the water-filled hollows that once supplied Bedfordshire’s brickworks with clay; the distant outlines of the great airship sheds at Cardington, built when that mode of travel had a future; the eroding embankment of a mineral line that once took ironstone from the Northampton quarries to the smelters at Scunthorpe. |
| But the abandonment isn’t complete. Among these indistinct reminders of a great industrial past, factories are still at work. As we went north, on a grey November morning, I noted Vauxhall at Luton, Weetabix at Kettering, Frederick Parker’s asphalt-spreaders at Leicester, Brush Electrical Machines at Loughborough, Bombardier’s trains at Derby, Joseph Clayton’s tannery at Chesterfield. The survival of some of these names – one or two of them painted in the old-fashioned way on a brick factory wall – is both a surprise and a reminder that manufacturing still accounts for 10% of the UK economy. | But the abandonment isn’t complete. Among these indistinct reminders of a great industrial past, factories are still at work. As we went north, on a grey November morning, I noted Vauxhall at Luton, Weetabix at Kettering, Frederick Parker’s asphalt-spreaders at Leicester, Brush Electrical Machines at Loughborough, Bombardier’s trains at Derby, Joseph Clayton’s tannery at Chesterfield. The survival of some of these names – one or two of them painted in the old-fashioned way on a brick factory wall – is both a surprise and a reminder that manufacturing still accounts for 10% of the UK economy. |
| Who can tell how many of them will last? Fifty years ago, when I first came this way on a train, manufacturing’s share of the cake was more than 30%. Factories in those days were no cause to turn your head to the carriage window. Passengers began to look up appreciatively only when the fields and the cows arrived. | Who can tell how many of them will last? Fifty years ago, when I first came this way on a train, manufacturing’s share of the cake was more than 30%. Factories in those days were no cause to turn your head to the carriage window. Passengers began to look up appreciatively only when the fields and the cows arrived. |
| The idea that we need to discover a new version of those old times is now the common currency of the political mainstream. After the financial crash came the call to “rebalance the economy” and lessen its dependence on the City of London. After Brexit came the need to foster national togetherness by addressing the neglect and alienation felt by many people in the former manufacturing districts of the Midlands and the north. Out of these two calamities have come revivalist schemes with romantic steam-and-iron names – the northern powerhouse and the Midlands engine – and now a white paper on industrial strategy, which is to be published on Monday. | The idea that we need to discover a new version of those old times is now the common currency of the political mainstream. After the financial crash came the call to “rebalance the economy” and lessen its dependence on the City of London. After Brexit came the need to foster national togetherness by addressing the neglect and alienation felt by many people in the former manufacturing districts of the Midlands and the north. Out of these two calamities have come revivalist schemes with romantic steam-and-iron names – the northern powerhouse and the Midlands engine – and now a white paper on industrial strategy, which is to be published on Monday. |
| Hope has to be taken where you find it – in my case at journey’s end, a 15-minute cab ride from Sheffield station | Hope has to be taken where you find it – in my case at journey’s end, a 15-minute cab ride from Sheffield station |
| If its preceding green paper is anything to go by, this could be a remarkable document, overturning the hands-off industrial policy that every government has stuck to since the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. According to Theresa May in the green paper’s introduction, her government will no longer be “just stepping back and leaving business to get on with the job, but stepping up to a new, active role that backs business”. | If its preceding green paper is anything to go by, this could be a remarkable document, overturning the hands-off industrial policy that every government has stuck to since the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. According to Theresa May in the green paper’s introduction, her government will no longer be “just stepping back and leaving business to get on with the job, but stepping up to a new, active role that backs business”. |
| The aim is to spread “wealth and opportunity … across every community in our United Kingdom, not just the most prosperous places in London and the south-east”. The means is a remedy for Britain’s great economic weakness: the persisting low productivity that mostly accounts for the economic forecast, said to be the bleakest in recent British history, a sad story that Philip Hammond unveiled in this week’s budget speech. | The aim is to spread “wealth and opportunity … across every community in our United Kingdom, not just the most prosperous places in London and the south-east”. The means is a remedy for Britain’s great economic weakness: the persisting low productivity that mostly accounts for the economic forecast, said to be the bleakest in recent British history, a sad story that Philip Hammond unveiled in this week’s budget speech. |
| The obstacles look immense: weak government by a party that in any case is philosophically opposed to intervention; an impoverished and stripped-down state preoccupied by Brexit; a culture that thinks of manufacturing as history; the apparently unstoppable power of roaming capital. Hope has to be taken where you find it – in my case at journey’s end, a 15-minute cab ride from Sheffield station, at the campus of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), spread across the site of the old coking plant at Orgreave. | The obstacles look immense: weak government by a party that in any case is philosophically opposed to intervention; an impoverished and stripped-down state preoccupied by Brexit; a culture that thinks of manufacturing as history; the apparently unstoppable power of roaming capital. Hope has to be taken where you find it – in my case at journey’s end, a 15-minute cab ride from Sheffield station, at the campus of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), spread across the site of the old coking plant at Orgreave. |
| It was here, in the summer of 1984, that pickets and police fought each other in the most violent and memorable episode of the miners’ strike – the Battle of Orgreave – and here, this summer, that the foundations began to be dug for Boeing’s first factory in Europe. | It was here, in the summer of 1984, that pickets and police fought each other in the most violent and memorable episode of the miners’ strike – the Battle of Orgreave – and here, this summer, that the foundations began to be dug for Boeing’s first factory in Europe. |
| Nobody I met made too much of this – nobody, for example referred to the phoenix and the ashes – perhaps because they understood it as simple coincidence. Boeing has come to Orgreave rather than elsewhere because of its long relationship with two Sheffield men, Keith Ridgway and Adrian Allen, who set up the AMRC with Boeing’s help in 2001, and chose the land at Orgreave because it was plentiful and cheap. | Nobody I met made too much of this – nobody, for example referred to the phoenix and the ashes – perhaps because they understood it as simple coincidence. Boeing has come to Orgreave rather than elsewhere because of its long relationship with two Sheffield men, Keith Ridgway and Adrian Allen, who set up the AMRC with Boeing’s help in 2001, and chose the land at Orgreave because it was plentiful and cheap. |
| Allen worked as the sales director for the Sheffield firm Technicut, which makes cutting tools for the aerospace industry; Ridgway was then professor of design and manufacture at Sheffield University, and an immensely practical man, connected by personal experience to an industrial Britain that began to die in the 1980s. The son of a turner who worked for firms of Manchester toolmakers (now long gone), he took a degree in engineering and served an apprenticeship with a Manchester pump-making company, Mather & Platt (also defunct, and perhaps best remembered in a Lowry painting of its workers trekking through the snow to the factory gate in 1943). | Allen worked as the sales director for the Sheffield firm Technicut, which makes cutting tools for the aerospace industry; Ridgway was then professor of design and manufacture at Sheffield University, and an immensely practical man, connected by personal experience to an industrial Britain that began to die in the 1980s. The son of a turner who worked for firms of Manchester toolmakers (now long gone), he took a degree in engineering and served an apprenticeship with a Manchester pump-making company, Mather & Platt (also defunct, and perhaps best remembered in a Lowry painting of its workers trekking through the snow to the factory gate in 1943). |
| To talk to him is to enter the discrete but indispensable world of machine tools – in our conversation he referred to the German émigré Franz Koenigsberger as “the God of cutting tools” – and to be humbled at the prospect of all the things one does not know. This feeling increased as we toured the research centre of which he’s now the executive dean, and looked at robots and listened to robotics engineers, many of whom have been recruited from the gaming industry to embed digital technology in manufacturing processes: one aspect of what the German economist Klaus Schwab has termed the fourth industrial revolution. | To talk to him is to enter the discrete but indispensable world of machine tools – in our conversation he referred to the German émigré Franz Koenigsberger as “the God of cutting tools” – and to be humbled at the prospect of all the things one does not know. This feeling increased as we toured the research centre of which he’s now the executive dean, and looked at robots and listened to robotics engineers, many of whom have been recruited from the gaming industry to embed digital technology in manufacturing processes: one aspect of what the German economist Klaus Schwab has termed the fourth industrial revolution. |
| About 600 staff work here, and they have some significant achievements to their name, refining aircraft components (for companies such as Rolls-Royce and the landing-gear specialists Messier-Bugatti-Dowty as well as Boeing) to make them lighter and stronger, or to speed up their manufacture. A thousand apprentice engineers have been trained in the past four years. If the simplest definition of productivity is as a measurement of outputs over inputs – the product compared with the costs and resources spent producing it – then Orgreave offers the classic way of raising it, which is to invest in smarter machinery and a more skilled workforce. | About 600 staff work here, and they have some significant achievements to their name, refining aircraft components (for companies such as Rolls-Royce and the landing-gear specialists Messier-Bugatti-Dowty as well as Boeing) to make them lighter and stronger, or to speed up their manufacture. A thousand apprentice engineers have been trained in the past four years. If the simplest definition of productivity is as a measurement of outputs over inputs – the product compared with the costs and resources spent producing it – then Orgreave offers the classic way of raising it, which is to invest in smarter machinery and a more skilled workforce. |
| Ridgway offered me an example I could understand, and introduced me on the shop floor to Christopher and Richard Jewitt, the father and son who own Footprint Tools, a Sheffield company that has been making hand tools for the building industry since the 1870s – and making them by hand, which is the kind of hard, repetitive labour that few among a younger generation can be found willing to do. The company also faced the competition from imports that has destroyed so much of Sheffield’s cutlery industry. At its peak, Footprint employed 400 people; it now employs 12. The Jewitts took their problem to the AMRC, who set them up with a young robotics engineer who is devising a program that will give a robot the equivalent of the subtle hand movements that presently shape one of their products (the Jewitts would prefer me not to name it, to gain what competitive advantage they can). “We’ve got to embrace the technology that’s out there,” said the senior Jewitt, adding that Germany could offer good prices because it had done exactly that. | Ridgway offered me an example I could understand, and introduced me on the shop floor to Christopher and Richard Jewitt, the father and son who own Footprint Tools, a Sheffield company that has been making hand tools for the building industry since the 1870s – and making them by hand, which is the kind of hard, repetitive labour that few among a younger generation can be found willing to do. The company also faced the competition from imports that has destroyed so much of Sheffield’s cutlery industry. At its peak, Footprint employed 400 people; it now employs 12. The Jewitts took their problem to the AMRC, who set them up with a young robotics engineer who is devising a program that will give a robot the equivalent of the subtle hand movements that presently shape one of their products (the Jewitts would prefer me not to name it, to gain what competitive advantage they can). “We’ve got to embrace the technology that’s out there,” said the senior Jewitt, adding that Germany could offer good prices because it had done exactly that. |
| The AMRC’s main building is circular and glass-walled so that children can see in, supposing they can be tempted up the hill from Rotherham and Sheffield. Ridgway said, rather vividly, that the project’s success would be judged by how many trails of snot were left behind on the glass by these young spectators. In fact, to judge by the number of advanced manufacturing centres this original has inspired – another is to be announced in Scotland soon – Orgreave’s success is unquestionable. | The AMRC’s main building is circular and glass-walled so that children can see in, supposing they can be tempted up the hill from Rotherham and Sheffield. Ridgway said, rather vividly, that the project’s success would be judged by how many trails of snot were left behind on the glass by these young spectators. In fact, to judge by the number of advanced manufacturing centres this original has inspired – another is to be announced in Scotland soon – Orgreave’s success is unquestionable. |
| Of course, higher productivity brings its own problems, including the risk of higher unemployment. And then there is the George Monbiot question: when does growth stop? But as I came home on the train, through a damp night in a bleak season of a depressing year, it seemed to me that Orgreave was a reason for optimism. | Of course, higher productivity brings its own problems, including the risk of higher unemployment. And then there is the George Monbiot question: when does growth stop? But as I came home on the train, through a damp night in a bleak season of a depressing year, it seemed to me that Orgreave was a reason for optimism. |
| • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist | • Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist |
| Productivity | |
| Opinion | |
| Budget | |
| Budget 2017 (November) | |
| Manufacturing sector | |
| Sheffield | |
| Economic policy | |
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