Posted: Feb 22, 2020 6:21 am
jamest wrote:Within my lifetime I've known a person who was actually there at The Somme in the summer of 1916 (), and of course I've known many who endured WW2, not least my gran. Her tale of hiding in shop doorways to get to work whilst the city was being bombed, still shivers my soul.
This ridiculous state of affairs that we have here where there are still people living who still know the horrors of what happened in the 20th century, were never going to be conducive to a situation in which the British people accepted being a slave of Europe. It's just a fucking stupid ideal which came a half-dozen decades too soon, imo. For the British people, anyway.
At least the UK finished up on the winning side, while Germany lay in ruins. Look at the situation now and ask yourself "How did this come about?" Stumped? OK, I'll tell you:
The tl;dr version
The automotive industry is a textbook example of what went wrong. Who buys a Jaguar these days, when you can buy a Porsche, BMW, Audi, Mercedes or a Volkswagen? While the UK was swamped with Japanese cars as its own factories shrank or closed down altogether, more than half of German cars are owned by happy customers in countries other than Germany, the emissions scandal Volkswagen brought on itself was overcome inside two years.
Ah. Volkswagen. It could have been a British brand. There's a story. It's factory lay in the British occupation zone. It also lay in ruins. Bombed out. Kaput, as the Germans would say. A British Major, Ivan Hirst, looked at the ruins and saw a potential in them. They could be sufficiently rehabilitated to function as a repair and maintenance workshop for British military vehicles. Then he realised that he could actually manufacture some cars there. The British administration of that part of Germany needed more cars to govern effectively. On August 22 1945 it ordered 20,000 Beetles. Two weeks later it ordered 20,000 more.
Things developed quite nicely. The first Beetle rolled out of the factory on December 27 that year. The 10,000th in October 1946. In 1947 the British government offered Volkswagen to Sir William Rootes and his brother Reginald, who already owned the factories that made Hillmans, Humbers and Sunbeams, as part of Germany's war reparation obligations. They rejected it, saying the car was too ugly and too noisy. On October 8, 1949 Great Britain signed the Volkswagenwerk over to the newly created (23 May 1949) Federal Republic of Germany.
If the post-war British industrialist can be viewed as bumbling and unimaginative as entrepreneurs, they were downright self-sabotaging when it came to industrial relations. There are two aspects to that topic. One is the matter of trade unions. Every industry was hobbled by a multitude of them, with each union having its own gripes and ambitions. Take trains. The Locomotive drivers union could stop the entire network. So could the train conductors union, the cleaners union, the mechanical maintenance union, the electrical maintenance union, the office workers union... You get the picture, right?
The other is the matter of how to handle disputes. The climate for negotiations was toxic. Antagonistic is not strong enough a word for it, nor is adversarial. Owners of the means of production saw the workers as enemies that must be tamed and controlled by any available means. Most of the time they had the government on their side. Attempts to organise round table talks were rare and even when they were made, they were half-hearted. It was almost open class warfare. The workers saw nothing that could encourage them to adopt a cooperative approach.
Now contrast that state of affairs with what happened in Germany. Trade unions as such had only a secondary role in wage negotiations. Most of them were done by workers representatives within each Industrial Community. So, the electricians working in chemical factories would send representatives to meetings with IG Farben. Electricians in car factories would do the same with IG Metal, and so on. Of course the same applies to other unions. Welders sent representatives to the meeting of whatever Industrial community they happen to be working in.
Every year each community would meet to hammer out an agreement and each meeting would consist of representatives from the owners of the businesses, the government and the workforce. Production targets would be discussed, economic forecasts analysed and whatever other topic that seemed pertinent to the negotiations at the time would also be brought up. The workers would understand what they got and why they got it, the owners could be cautiously confident of relative industrial peace for the next 12 months and government had a better picture of what lay ahead of them, which gave them a better chance to come up with an appropriate budget. Strikes still occurred, but nowhere near as frequently, nor as disruptively as in the UK. Because people were not so much preoccupied with fighting each other they could focus on the more useful bits, like designing and producing stuff, or providing a service.
The short version:
Post-WWII British industrialists fucked everything up.
And instead of learning from their mistakes, they not only keep right on making them, but inventing new ways of shooting themselves - and their fellow citizens - in the foot, but that's another story.