Deindustrialisation Destroyed the Workers’ Movement — the Left Must Reverse It
The Tory project of deindustrialisation was a catastrophe for workers. It smashed the confidence of the socialist movement, which can’t become aloof to its historic demands for decent, dignified work.
Workers at Tata steel protest job losses. (Ben Birchall - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
The miners’ strike is often heralded as the beginning of the end for Britain’s once fearsome trade unions, the moment at which the backbone of workers’ organisation within industry was broken. Much less referenced (yet no less significant) was the manner in which the breaking of the miners, and subsequently the destruction of much of the remainder of the British trade union movement, also heralded the end of Britain as an industrial power.
Towards the end of the 1970s, an interesting symbiosis had occurred between organised labour and industrial capitalism — not just within Britain, but across much of the Western world. Having grown in conflict to mass industry which created the foundations of modern capitalism, by the end trade unions were its guardians. The two irreconcilable forces of organised labour and industrial capitalism fought a new fight together, one they were doomed to lose, against a new economic model for the United Kingdom based on financial and commercial ‘services’.
It can be difficult to imagine the re-emergence of an industrial future now, as the last remnants of Britain’s industrial capacity lie in ruins. Employment in manufacturing has collapsed from a quarter of the workforce in 1980 to only 8 percent today. The towns and cities of Britain’s ‘industrial belts’ of the Scottish Lowlands, the North West, South Yorkshire, the Midlands, and South Wales are littered with soot-stained old chimneys, mills, and stone warehouses from days past — often standing empty, repurposed for the sale of cheap bric-a-brac or for housing. As Tata Steel closes its coke ovens at Port Talbot, threatening thousands of redundancies, one can’t help but feel like the sun is setting on the country’s legacy as an industrial powerhouse.
So much the better, some say. A common refrain within liberally-minded British society today is that, while the loss of these industries was painful (and executed dreadfully by Mrs Thatcher and her government), it was also necessary and ultimately for the best. Isn’t it a good thing that people in this country don’t have to work down the mines anymore? Wasn’t coal a dirty fossil fuel — an obstacle to Britain’s progress towards a zero-carbon future? And weren’t the pits, and our industries in general, simply made unprofitable by the high safety standards and wages expected by our heavily unionised British workforce?
To reconcile this narrative of progress with our country’s deindustrialisation, one must ignore the catastrophic social impact it has wrought. Britain’s extraordinary regional inequality, unparalleled among other developed nations, has become the legacy of deindustrialisation — creating economic dead zones of chronic intergenerational unemployment, poor health, and poverty. It is no coincidence that a map of the most deprived areas of the UK sits almost perfectly over the sites of former coalfields in the UK, the cradles of the Industrial Revolution. The miners striking in 1984 weren’t naïve — they knew full well they were fighting for the preservation of their communities, for a culture of working-class collectivism, and for the future of their children. In the words of Arthur Scargill at a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) conference in April that year, ‘This battle is certainly about more than the miners’ union. It is for the right to work. It is for the right to preserve our pits. It is for the right to preserve this industry.’
A truth so often lost is that in 1984 the miners knew that there was an alternative to pit closures. State investment in a strategically vital industry could have sustained not only the jobs and livelihoods of the miners but also the economic activity of the communities in which they lived. The cost to the Exchequer of paying out unemployment benefits to redundant miners and their children for generations, following the closure of the pits, dwarfs any ‘savings’ made through ending subsidies to the National Coal Board. Andrew Glyn, writing for the Social Scientist journal in 1985, argued that the ‘savings’ of £275 million accrued by laying off 20,000 miners in 1984 were more than offset by the £480 million in ‘lost tax revenue and through having to pay dole to the unemployed’. He concluded that
[C]losing the so-called ‘unprofitable’ pits … would have imposed substantial losses on the rest of society as well as on the miners concerned. In no sense then, can these ‘unprofitable’ pits be labelled ‘uneconomic’ from the point of view of society.
Glyn further estimates the cost of the miners’ strike to the Exchequer to be £2 billion, a staggering £6.5 billion today. If we consider the wider costs of the ravages of deindustrialisation on the British economy since, the argument that this path was chosen of economic necessity appears increasingly ludicrous. Why, then, did the British ruling class wage such a war on the miners, and how did they allow our industries to be decimated so thoroughly?
In 1984, the same year as the miners’ strike, Cambridge scholar Geoffrey Ingham laid out a thesis on the evolution of British capitalism in his seminal work Capital Divided? In the book, Ingham argues that Britain is an exceptional case study in the development of capitalist economies in its sociological, political, and economic separation between finance and industry.
The traditional Marxist view had been that finance capital stems from the surpluses created by industrial capitalism, servicing the needs of developing industry and eventually subordinating them (such a thesis describes well the process through which the early industrial economy of Germany developed, Marx’s immediate source material). Contrarily, Ingham notes that, in Britain, the City of London existed many hundreds of years before the development of industry. Further to this, in tracking British capital’s interests, Ingham writes that the British financial system has never been substantially invested in the development, maintenance, or modernisation of British industry — which, perhaps uniquely among global equivalents, was relatively self-financed through localised stock exchanges. As such, despite having had a substantial head start in the international industrial race, by the early twentieth century British industry was under-resourced, and increasingly uncompetitive in comparison to its great industrial rivals in France, Germany, and the USA.
The Forward March of Labour
In the context of the long-term decline of underfunded British industry, trade unions nevertheless steadily and consistently increased their leverage and power, extracting vastly greater sums of value from those industries to be redistributed in wages among their workforce. Vital for the continuity of industrial production, organised labour became increasingly enmeshed into the fabric of the British state, with the elected labour bodies consulted by both Labour and Tory governments in office.
As the world entered a global economic crisis in the 1970s, this power made itself felt. The ‘corrective’ influence of market forces was not permitted to perform its function of disestablishing lagging industries, laying off their workforces and restoring high rates of profit. Instead, industries were protected by the state — some even nationalised, as in the infamous example of British Leyland. By the advent of the Thatcher government, nationalised industry accounted for nearly 10 percent of the British workforce.
This era of industrial protectionism is often characterised as some kind of economic catastrophe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 1970s remains the singular example of an era of economic recession in which average real wages increased — growing at a faster rate during the 1970s than during the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. Real GDP growth per capita outperformed that of the 1980s, as well as every decade before or since. But from the perspective of capital, and particularly British finance capital, such social successes came at the grave cost of the loss of the dominance of capital accumulation in determining the production, distribution, and allocation of social resources. Trade unions had been the cuckoos in the nest of British industry, feeding from and ultimately supplanting the power of industrial capitalists, and fundamentally altering the terms of the game for the benefit of ordinary working people.
Of all the former industrial powerhouses of the twentieth century, Britain went further and faster in its destruction of industry than any of its contemporaries. Though all Western nations experienced the ideological emergence of neoliberalism in this period, and similar processes of deindustrialisation, few countries other than Britain embraced the doctrine with as much enthusiasm and dogmatism. Ingham’s thesis provides us a theory on why and how this could have been the case. Quite simply, British finance capital had no interest, pecuniary or otherwise, in allowing such excesses to continue.
The cost of this process has had more than simply economic implications. Britain’s collective working-class identity — and, with it, the hegemonic culture of its socialist movement — was forged through the experiences of its industrialised communities. Britain, having been the first nation to industrialise, has the oldest such communities in the world, and the historic shadow of our industrial past still runs deep in the folk history and heritage of these places. From brass bands to working men’s clubs and sports like football, the collective culture of many areas of Britain was defined by the workplaces which built their towns. To this day, the British vernacular is littered with regional identities grounded in the bittersweet industrial heritage of their place, be they Mackems in Sunderland, Smoggies in Teeside, residents of Black Country, or the pejorative epithet of ‘woollybacks’ or ‘wools’ to define non-Liverpudlians in Liverpool. Deindustrialisation destroyed not just the workers’ movement, not just jobs, but also a buoyant, self-confident, and politically conscious working-class culture.
The alternative economic model of services which has been promoted in industry’s wake has hopelessly failed to provide an adequate replacement. High ‘gross value added’ (GVA) services in the ‘knowledge economy’ have not spread to the low-value land in our former industrial heartlands, preferring instead to cluster near urban centres. Nor could these sectors provide the quantity of employment required to sustain deindustrialised communities, even if they did relocate to the sticks. Equally, the low-paid service sector professions which have grown in the wake of industry provide neither the security nor the remuneration of the old jobs which have been lost — with fewer avenues to train in applied skills and trades (unlike our previous industrial economy with its constant thirst for engineers, artisans, and skilled construction workers).
Towards Reindustrialisation
Just as deindustrialisation was a choice, so too is the question of the form our economic future will take. We could sit back and watch as our former industrial communities continue to wither, unable to sustain themselves in the new service-led economy which has dominated our economic reality since the 1990s. Or we could seek alternatives which tailor themselves to the particular needs and demands of these ravaged regions of our country.
Today, there is a huge opportunity for the labour movement to put its shoulder behind a new industrial plan for our country, tapping into the heritage of our deindustrialised areas while providing a new, modern vision for the future. As articulated in campaigns such as the Green New Deal and demands for a just transition for workers in carbon-intensive sectors into sustainable industries and jobs, a process of reindustrialisation can be coupled with the delivery of the infrastructure, skills, and jobs we will require to realise our development into a net-zero society. Elegantly, the Green New Deal message provides a route to achieving carbon-neutrality without the endorsement of eco-austerity, the continued restriction of the consumption of working-class people, which presently feeds such a fevered discourse within the culture wars. It’s a path which can be married with the twin cause of ‘levelling up’ the nation’s regions, while helping to fulfil the innate human desire to create and build.
Lessons from the miners’ strike can be learned with existing fossil fuel industries, which must be scaled down and replaced if we ever wish to achieve our ambitions of reaching net zero. As opposed to the ‘unjust transition’ of the miners, a just transition for energy workers in carbon-intensive sectors should be developed and subsidised by the state — not as a cost to the Exchequer, but as an investment in our collective future. Treasury management at the level of a nation state must be more than a process of bean counting. Investment in industry is an investment in jobs, in the future of our regions, and a healthier balance of payments for the nation.
And perhaps there is another, altogether more pragmatic, motivator for the reindustrialisation of Britain. Numerous economic and political shocks throughout the past decade (Brexit, Covid-19, the war in Ukraine) seem to have aroused some recognition among our political class that the present model of service-sector-led economic activity places Britain in a precarious geopolitical position. With no intention of mending the harm done to deindustrialised communities, our leaders may yet find themselves stumbling upon part of the solution, in search of an answer to shoring up Britain’s international power. This process may already be under way with or without the sanction of the political left.
There are angry communities demand- ing an answer to the degradation and intergenerational suffering of their towns; they cannot be left dangling without alternatives to the continued decline. Those same communities — once the founders and bastions of the working-class socialist movement — could easily be friend or foe to a modern left, which has become numb to their plight.