On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest.
The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around the world were keen to purchase what were considered premium brands from Britain. Manufacturing is also a very forgiving and open sector for employment, with low barriers to entry for those entering the workforce for the first time, re-entrants returning after a period of time away handling kin-keeping responsibilities, and those looking for a career change.
Unfortunately, the societal culture shifts which took place during the 1960s, as Britain moved strongly away from the shadow of two World Wars, lensed manufacturing as “undesirable”, a sector that wasn’t feminist, a sector which wasn’t in keeping with the newly energised, futuristic-focused Great Britain. People didn’t want their young adult children working in factories, people didn’t want to live near factories, people didn’t want to have to drive past factories, and with the elder Baby Boomers reaching adulthood, there was a rising demand for housing, which had people getting a little testy about why these huge factories were able to occupy so much land that nice little starter homes could be built on. Increasingly, people were also becoming more aware of the environment, and human beings’ impacts on it through pollution - and factories still aren’t the most environmentally friendly establishments. The increase in people going to university - and the government’s increasing perception of university as a desirable diversion for those in their late teens to early twenties - reduced personal tolerance for the hard work and long hours of manufacturing; in the days when attending university was more affordable, thanks to government grants and other support, but also significantly harder than it is today, people not unreasonably felt they were “owed” an easier working life. With women increasingly entering the workforce, households needed to have at least one person available at the weekends, to attend to domestic responsibilities which, in previous decades, women would have taken on, often alongside working as cleaners for wealthier households or unmarried men, taking in laundry, and childminding, while men went to more formal, recognised work. Factories would typically be running on Saturdays, and even those who weren’t on a Saturday shift would often volunteer to go in because Saturdays at that time were often paid on ‘time and a half’, especially in larger factories, because it was recognised that people were being taken away from household demands, and should be compensated for that.
We Need to Bring Back Manufacturing, Then!
It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Re-establish factories, force people to take manufacturing jobs if they’re unemployed but able to work, build factories on public transport routes, and expand the route provision to ensure all shift times are served by public transport, so people can’t claim they can’t work in manufacturing because they don’t have their own transport, and can’t reliably get to or from the site for factory shifts - something which is a very real and present barrier for people who can’t drive for medical reasons, rather than those who “prefer not to”, or prioritise other expenses over the expense of owning and running a car.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible in 2024, for several reasons:
1. We’ve lost too many former factories, and too much land, to housing - including housing that isn’t actually being lived in.
2. The UK has too many competitors, who are always going to be able to produce goods far more cheaply, which will be preferred by UK citizens, who feel their own financial circumstances are severely straitened. We have also, potentially, seen an actual loss of people taking genuine pride in their work, or at least a fixation on “producing more for the same price, in the same amount of time”, which inevitably results in a decline in quality, meaning British-made goods don’t visually reflect the prices that have to be charged for them to enable the costs of manufacture to be met, and a profit collected. (Which is, after all, the point and the definition of ‘employment’ - that you exceed the costs of producing or providing goods and services sufficiently to invest in maintenance and improvement, keep reserves funding at optimal levels, and also pay yourself and your staff well, and invest in your local community), We’re not going to be able to reclaim the position we’ve lost to emerging economies such as China and India.
3. The UK’s business owners are very resistant to spending money on improvements, and adopting more relaxed working practices, which would enable workers to comfortably continue in high-physical-stress manufacturing roles into older age, and which would fully facilitate people with disabilities being able to enjoy well-paid work that is manageable within the limits of their disabilities. In contrast to the UK’s insistence on people standing for hours on factory process lines, German company Daimler has their production crews working from rail-mounted, hydraulic carts, which reduces stress on workers’ bodies, enabling people to remain in their roles for longer, and making it easier for disabled people to access employment with Daimler. This is the kind of cost that would see UK business owners taking to LinkedIn to rant about “wokeness” and how you “can’t just be expected to rearrange everything around peoples’ specific needs and comfort levels”, and that “people are just lazy, and don’t want to work these days!” - which is what British business owners do in response to literally any suggestion of ways they can stop people quitting because of their “bad back” or “mental health” at 55.
What Are We Going to Do, Then?
In a globalised world, it’s impossible for a country with a high cost of living, and an extreme amount of debt that it needs to pay down, because of its excessive reliance on international credit, like the UK, to be competitive in manufacturing.
Germany does it better. China and India do it both quicker and cheaper. There are countries with far more land reserves available for building new factories, and less red tape, meaning those factories can be built and brought into the supply chain before the first planning meeting in the UK has finished. Many countries also have vastly superior interlinking of their road-rail-sea links, making it effortless, in comparison to the UK, for goods to be transported internationally - because, remember, the money for manufacturing comes from exporting the things you’ve made. There are exceptionally wealthy individuals and countries out there, with resources far beyond what the average British person would be able to afford to pay for goods made in the UK, but, increasingly, they’re meeting their own manufacturing needs. The UK has been sidelined, and we set ourselves up for that decentring.
Even if a manufacturing business in Britain were to come up with a completely unique, high-ticket offering, the cost of property - whether purchased or rented - makes it an almost impossible proposition to get a volume-focused factory set up and running. And it’s genuinely not possible for everything to be “made from someone’s kitchen table.” (Increasingly, because houses are becoming smaller, and more people are living their entire lives in one-bedroom flats, because of rising property prices, many people don’t even have a kitchen table. Some people barely have a kitchen, these days… Since I moved out of my parents’ home, I’ve never actually lived anywhere that the kitchen wasn’t either a narrow strip of afterthought running to the back door and the bathroom, or a chunk that had been taken out of the living room, with just enough floor space to move between counter areas and open the lower-set cupboards - though not always at the same time. And my experience isn’t unusual.)
De-globalising is genuinely impossible. The British public - even the most diversity-intolerant of them - would probably riot if they were told they were no longer able to go abroad for their holidays. People have family all around the world, whom they are going to insist on being able to continue to visit. Almost 5% of the British adult population are vegan, and the UK doesn’t produce enough variety of entirely plant-based food to meet core nutrition requirements on a year-round basis. Our climate doesn’t allow it, and we don’t have enough quality agricultural land to facilitate attempting to improve our provisions through industrial-scale greenhouses. People need medication that can’t be produced in volume in the UK. Our education system is creating a skills gap that can only be bridged through immigration; even if we transformed education completely by the end of next week, there will still be a gap of 5-15 years before those in education now are entering the workforce. That’s a lifetime for businesses, and, certainly by the time the very youngest in education were old enough to enter the workplace, workplace needs would have shifted sufficiently enough for the skills gaps to still remain.
So…How Do We Solve the Problem?
Just as our personal lives can’t improve without a degree of unpleasantness, the same is true for the UK transforming itself in order to rebalance the economy.
Accepting a decline in living standards is not viable - when living standards decline, people spend less, which reduces the revenues available to the exchequer, increasing numbers of older and disabled people find they are no longer able to access the social support and accommodations that enable them to remain in employment, which creates a rising cost to the welfare state; if the government refuse to accept this cost, they burden themselves with increased healthcare costs in respect of a rising homeless population, and the health issues that come with the demands of trying to survive unhoused. If the UK government refuses to ensure its population can be affordably and suitably housed, and just accepts homelessness as a fact of life, it finds itself becoming undesirable for tourists, and thus missing out on the considerable income visitors from both inside and outside the UK bring with them. People in poverty increasingly reject the drawn-out process of getting money that is lawful employment, pursuing the instant remuneration occupations of drug dealing, sex work, and other ‘shadow economy’ employment - which doesn’t just pay quickly, but also pays well, resulting in people who are disinclined to return to the much lower pay of ‘legitimate’ employment. Children who grow up in poverty are less likely to achieve minimum academic standards, which shuts them out of employment, as business owners respond to increased expenses by creating higher and wider barriers to workforce entry - which is why, for at least the past 15yrs, cleaning jobs have been stating “Must have 5 GCSEs, A-C, minimum” - when you do not need to be academically geared, in any way, shape, or form, to know how to use a vacuum cleaner, a mop and bucket, a steam cleaner, a duster, and how to not gas yourself when combining cleaning products. (The simplest answer - don’t. Just use bleach.) There is no need at all to require GCSEs for cleaning jobs, and cleaning is a necessary and vital job - machinery that isn’t cleaned properly will jam. People don’t work effectively in smelly, untidy environments. And nobody copes well with clogged, grimy toilets. People like to go to nightclubs and bars to socialise, and, despite the mess they make while they’re there, they expect to walk into a scrubbed and pleasantly-scented establishment when they turn out again. Cleaners are actually enabling everyone else to do every other job, as well as inspiring customers to enter shops, and clients to do repeat business with professional service companies.
Any government which insists that “people will just have to accept a lower standard of living” is compromising its own financial security, and ensuring it will never be able to get the society it runs out of damaging financial circumstances.
So, we can’t just “force people to accept less.”
That means we either need to produce more that other countries will pay us for, or charge more for what we already produce.
Both of those options involve money being spent. Money which, currently, the UK doesn’t actually have.
Both of those options demand a radical reform and refocusing of education, a complete removal of many entry barriers to a range of occupations, and systemic improvements to ensure that ageing and disabled workers can remain physically able to do the jobs which actually provide the majority of Britain’s income - and the systemic improvements are going to cost money. Which businesses may not have, and the UK government definitely doesn’t have.
Within the limitations of not being able to reduce standards of living - which means that individuals with disabilities which prevent them working will still need to have their living costs met, at least until British business ups its game, and learns to accept that disability doesn’t have to mean redundancy - because reducing living standards would further reduce the financial resources available to the UK government, there will need to be removal of financial support. Some obvious change-ups are:
. Businesses, rather than the government, being solely responsible for pensions. In short, the State pension is removed, and people have to have been continually employed for a minimum period, and employed by the same company for a further minimum period, in order to be eligible for a pension which represents a percentage of their final salary (final salary pensions make it easier for people to plan effectively for their retirement.) This is likely to inspire British businesses to get their act together around making manual processes less physically impactful, being more flexible for all workers, and having less of an attitude about accommodations and adjustments for disability, because it would ensure that people are employed with them longer, and thus contribute more towards their own pensions. The British government would then only have responsibility for those who were unable to work owing to disability impacts which could not be mitigated, and those who, despite their best efforts, combined with actual effort from jobcentre staff, were unable to secure lasting employment. However, a risk of this would be that businesses would simply refuse to employ people as permanent staff, so that they could avoid their responsibilities in this area.
. The UK government stops providing foreign aid. As attractive as this often is to those on the right, and more of the left than will admit it, removing foreign aid results in fatally lowered standards of living in those countries - this results in a sharp increase in migrants who do not have specific work-related skills into countries like the UK, out of extreme and genuine desperation, which creates untenable conflict between the existing UK population without specific skills, who should be given priority access to job roles which do not require specific skills, and also reduces the pool of available skilled migrants, who may be needed, at relatively short notice, to bridge a skills-gap until effective education can provide enough appropriately skilled individuals to close the gap.
. Government subsidies to businesses, and funding to non-profits, is removed, beyond supporting a new initiative through its first three years. This will cause a lot of upset for British business owners, who have become used to being able to get tax breaks, direct support, and lucrative government contracts. It would throw the NHS into a very real, and unavoidable, crisis - administrators and front line clinicians would no longer be able to be resistant to transformative change of processes. Patients would no longer be able to refuse to engage with technology. Doctors and senior clinicians would no longer be in a position to refuse to work outside of standard office hours. People would have to become used to the idea that they would have to age naturally, including taking on the physical impacts of that, and businesses would have to adapt their working practices to accommodate a naturally ageing population. People would have to accept that cosmetic surgery, including gender-affirming surgery, surgery to repair damage caused by serious accidents, and violent attacks, wouldn’t be available to many people, and therefore they would have to raise their children, discipline their classrooms and workforces, to a point where people can behave well to those who look very startlingly different, and where strong featured women with facial hair and unexpected genitalia, and soft-featured men who don’t have the equipment to impregnate others, are accepted as men and women, as they are, and their identity is supported by their behaviour, their energy, and their way of existing in and engaging with the world, not just their appearance. Individuals and companies would also become more aware of safety, since the option to “have any damage sorted on the NHS” would be less able to be taken for granted.
Despite the initial reactionary responses, this probably the most long-term sustainable course of action - but it will require a series of bold, confident governments to both initiate and continue it, and it will require extensive communication, at all levels, to explain what it is needed, so that it is less likely to be diluted or outright voted down, or result in reactionary voting at general elections, because those who don’t understand the need for it feel they “shouldn’t have to put up with it.”
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