Just over fourteen days have now elapsed since the government announced legal measures to enforce its lockdown policy. During that fortnight the country has undergone a series of seismic upheavals unprecedented in peacetime. Some have brought out the worst in the British character, some the best. We’ve witnessed the panic buying of loo rolls and seen the Derbyshire police act like officious idiots. But we’ve also seen an emergency hospital built from scratch in nine days with the help of the military, and have welcomed an army of volunteers, three-quarters of a million strong, who have come forward to help the NHS beat the coronavirus.
One of the most striking consequences of the coronavirus pandemic in its early stages was the belated acceptance that so many of the manufactured goods that we need in Britain today have to be imported from abroad. We saw the government frantically trying to buy from other countries firstly the ventilators, masks and protective clothing so desperately needed for our NHS staff, and later the testing kits essential to control the spread of infection.
In a dramatic way a long-standing weakness of the British economy was exposed. But how did we get there? Why, oh why, did we stop making almost everything except cars? I can understand Margaret Thatcher’s reluctance to support state-subsidised, union-ulcerated lame ducks like British Leyland. I can accept that it’s perhaps best to leave the manufacture of widgets like i-phones to others, in view of our high labour costs But why did we abandon the manufacturing of all the things in between? Why aren’t we making sophisticated engineering products sold in the tens or hundreds of thousands rather than millions?
Unfortunately, nowhere is this glaring deficiency more apparent than in our hospitals, in which just about all the equipment used, from MRI scanners to beds, seems to come from abroad.
But things are changing fast. After a great deal of bureaucratic reluctance the government is calling on major British companies to fulfil some of the emergency needs. Firms like Dyson, Airbus, Babcock and Rolls-Royce are now collaborating with universities to develop and manufacture a new generation of ventilators, while others are working on the production of test kits.
We can only hope that this initiative will lead to a new industrial strategy. A good start would be for the government to insist that all its departments and all local authorities Buy British wherever possible. And when it isn’t immediately possible they should be seeking out entrepreneurs capable of setting up companies that can make what is needed. Without the burden of tariffs or shipping costs they could do so at competitive prices while creating employment for British workers – especially, perhaps, in some of our more deprived northern cities. In this way our capacity to manufacture could be restored.
The question of how we allowed ourselves to arrive at such a degree of industrial impotence will also need to be addressed when the present crisis is over. In fact, the answer is simple: it lies in a major weakness of the liberal-left elite (otherwise known as the moronic metropolitan mafia) which has dominated political thinking for the part thirty years. This weakness is an unmatched tendency to espouse shallow intellectual fashions that subsequently prove to be deeply flawed. And one of those fashions is gormless globalisation. But the fatuous fashion syndrome is another story.
Grumpy Greybeard 