The details of the British performance were overall dismal, at least if compared with Germany and France. The figures were endlessly repeated in gloomy articles in this period, as British commentators recognized what was happening (it was obvious enough just from a train window). In Germany and France, in the period 1960-73, management and workers just produced more per hour every year. Their productivity rose at 5.7 and 6.6 per cent respectively, as against a British figure of 4.1, and in the 1970s the gap grew. By then, on the official figures, Britain was even worse off than East Germany, and West Germans — especially a Hamburg Anglophile like Helmut Schmidt — shook their heads. The British share of world exports declined — one quarter in 1950, 14 per cent in 1964, under 10 in 1973. German exports rose from 7 per cent to one fifth, and then, in 1973, over 22 per cent. France stood at 10 per cent throughout. But the French direction of trade shifted away from colonies, which had accounted for nearly half of trade in 1952 but only one tenth by 1977. The Common Market accounted for the difference. The American share fell from over one quarter in 1950 to one fifth in 1964 and then one sixth in 1973, but of course the smaller share was quantitatively far larger. Japanese trade rose from almost nothing to 8.3 per cent in 1962 and 13 per cent in 1973. There was always an argument that the British decline was not really a decline at all, that the country had started from an artificially inflated position, that it was bound to lose ground as other countries learned, and therefore that there was nothing to worry about. But there was, and the collapse of British industry in the period after 1950 is a dismal story, in which areas that had been well and truly on the map of civilization shrunk into its edges. In the nineteenth century intelligent Germans asked why they were not British. A century later it would (or should: there was not much informed interest in Germany, and in 1989, when the Wall in Berlin came down, there were only eighty-nine passes in higher-level German in the entire London school area) have been the other way about.
Geoffrey Owen’s account of this is the most illuminating, as it examines various industries in turn to look at the problem in detail. There are various long-term and short-term questions. The longer-term ones are of considerable historical interest, and the quality of history written in the past generation in Great Britain is head and shoulders above that found elsewhere: the National Archives are the best in the world, though reaching them on the British transport system is itself a considerable test for scholarship. England had somehow modernized without ‘modernizing’: the political system consisted of living fossils, and there was not even a written constitution.
In the 1960s, as the country slipped, there was much head-shaking, and a small tidal wave of ink was spilled on reform of this or that part of the historical legacy — especially the matter of class. However, there was one recent inheritance that was hardly challenged at alclass="underline" that of the Labour government in 1945. It was bathed in a golden glow of togetherness. In 1965 A. J. P. Taylor published his English History 1914-1945, a brilliant book, and he (strongly Labour) ended it with the characteristic line, ‘Men no longer sang England, Arise! But England had arisen, just the same.’ Fifteen years later, as he looked out over rubbish-strewn streets in a not very fortunate part of London, his savings eaten by inflation, he was not so sure. Was there one single piece of legislation in that brave-dawn era which he would not have repealed? There had been widespread nationalization of industry and transport. They had a captured state market, and they provided employment — the National Health Service, providing medical attention cost-free, the largest non-military employer in Europe. But the record as the sixties and seventies went on was dismal. Nearly £100bn had been invested in the nationalized concerns and the annual return was −1 per cent. By 1982 nationalized industries had cost over £40bn in write-offs. The automobile-making British Leyland cost, in a ten-year period covering the seventies and early eighties, £3bn, and most of the once great British automobile industry became an international joke. In other countries, the failure of nationalized industry was not taken as self-evident. In England, it was a sort of non-violent protection racket, and to have a telephone installed or a piece of gas equipment repaired took the sort of little black-humour epic that Communist countries knew so well. However, the nationalized industries had not appeared for no reason: private concerns were not an advertisement for the alternative. In fact they themselves often appealed for state money, and became in effect nationalized.
The great British staples had been coal, shipping, textiles. Grand Victorian cities had been built up on that basis, Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester especially, which Taylor knew so well, and in their great days they had been as much pioneer cities as had been, say, Boston. Even in the 1950s, the staples were holding up, in part because markets in the Empire had been protected. Cotton textiles still amounted to half of exports in 1950, but India and Hong Kong had been allowed to export with an agreement in 1932, and England became a net importer of cotton goods at the end of the decade, for the first time since 1750. The war had at least got shipping going again. But in the 1950s there was also an absolute decline and later in some cases even a collapse; it affected some of the very industries upon which the thirties recovery had been based.
Shipping was a British disaster area. After 1945 there had been a world boom, as trade grew, and by 1975 world shipping output had risen to 36 million tons, as against the pre-war 2 million (at worst) and 7 million (at best). For a time the British went on as before, with 1,324 launchings in 1950 (almost two fifths of the entire world figure). The chief shipping centres, especially Glasgow, flourished: those ranks and ranks of cranes, stretching all along the Clyde estuary, with an entire culture to match, and, at its educational heart, the Royal Technical College, which trained generations of engineers and maritime specialists from all over. In 1950 the British merchant fleet was a quarter of the world’s. But then came decline — 172 launchings in 1985 — by which time the British fleet was only a small fraction of the world’s. Some of this was ‘unfair’ in the sense that strong competition, and a desire to cut costs and to avoid the detailed regulation that was coming up, meant that there was an enormous growth in foreign registrations (e.g. Panama). Some of it had to do with pride in quality: those Clyde-built steamers sometimes had an extraordinary finish, no longer in demand. But a great deal had to do with new technology, at which Norway and Germany became more adept, with oil tankers and container ships: these were ugly, sometimes prefabricated and welded together. Japan, as the Korean War went ahead, boomed. By 1956 she had overtaken Britain, where yards were too small and apparently dominated by skilled men defending their position at the expense of technology that might have been used by people with lesser skills — an old, old problem.