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The Secret Engineer
The Secret Engineer
The ordered, sensible world of the Secret Engineer’s youth has been turned on its head. He, or she, asks why we have changed the rules?
Home truths
When my kids ask me difficult questions I’m always very careful to give the most accurate answers that I can. That’s because I remember how some of the answers that my Dad gave me have shaped my thinking over the years.
I remember getting quite excited when I saw a continental police force using Porsches. I asked my Dad if our police might start driving Porsches. He immediately dismissed that idea and informed me that they would always drive British made cars. He went on to explain that it would be wrong to spend British taxpayers’ money supporting foreign workers and silly to boost another country’s economy rather than our own.
It’d never happen here
Over the years he explained several other things that also seemed to make perfect sense. He explained that our farmers are very efficient and that we are able to be almost self sufficient for a lot of foodstuffs. He explained that some industries like gas, electricity, water and even railways were natural monopolies and so it didn’t make sense to have different companies in competition. He asked me to imagine what it would be like if each house had a number of gas pipes, electricity lines and phone lines running to it. How silly and wasteful would it be to have multiple train lines connecting the same cities he asked me? Later in life I came across other things that seemed perfectly logical, like a large coal fired power station built adjacent to a big colliery with many years of coal left.
All these things seemed so sensible; I wonder why we have changed the rules now. The coal mine was shut because of a power struggle, despite there being plenty of coal still underground, and when I visited the power station some years ago they told me the coal now comes all the way from South America. Farmers’ fields are left empty or used for cash crops because of EU directives. I read recently that most police cars are now foreign made and Merseyside police have recently caused some upset by choosing to replace locally built Vauxhall Astras with Korean made Hyundais. During my own career I’ve been made redundant as a result of a government decision to buy products from overseas. Then, when I was short of money after being made redundant, I don’t believe the choice of utility companies on offer allowed me to save money or get better service.
So I’m always very careful with the answers I give to my children, because I’m never sure how the world might change. There’s one other thing I remember my Dad telling me, and that was that the Prince of Wales would never be allowed to get divorced, let alone re-marry.
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Readers' comments (17)
Paul Reeves | 31 Jul 2012 10:30 am
I think this comment displays a slight naivety especially regarding the benefits of international trade and even if there is a lot of coal underground is it necessarily easy to extract (at least with current levels of technology)? Sometimes it just is more sensible to just import it more cheaply from abroad and as a nation get on with developing new industries.
One important historical (and economic-political) event this comment misses out is the breakup of the Soviet Union 20 odd years ago and the widespread global impact it has had. As well as removing any (appalling as it was) social-economic & political ‘alternative’ to the free (ish) market West/Japan it also removed any serious opposition/alternative to the market globally. Initially this ideologically buoyed up western governments and business leaders, although the freeing up of the market (arguably and ironically the exception being China and the BRICs) did not really stimulate the Western Economies over the long term. In addition state spending (even under Thatcher & Reagan) remained high (in fact increased, with many businesses from BAe to public/private ‘partnerships’ effectively being supported by state ‘welfare’). Financialisation & credit made the economy look dynamic (to both Labour and Tories)– but has now caught up with us.
Globalisation did increase with both beneficial and not so beneficial effects – depending on your view point (far greater choice of foods in the UK is I think beneficial, cars are much better than 20 years ago, the democratization of flight is a good thing). In some areas the ‘opening up’ of the market has produced better goods and services and not without losers (some deservedly so – others may be not so). Maybe the UK was more enthusiastic over the opening up of the free market compared to say France – apparently suffering the loss of control of many of its big name firms – but it hasn’t done so bad itself if one looks (WPP being just one example). Also UK governments should have took a much greater leadership role in setting up new powerstations and building more airport runways rather than being overly frightened of the green lobby. It is ironic that at the point when the markets were set ‘free’ government and business has decided to get into bed with the low growth environmentalists.
So why don’t we accept that items such as police cars are now effectively commodity items that can be made by anyone, forget our little Englander protectionist ideas and push our government and business leaders to develop new industries- given there are no ideological barriers to them doing so and engineers can get over the technological ones.
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Anonymous | 31 Jul 2012 1:49 pm
Does no one else recall the simple fact that in the seventies, the only reason our Motor industry went back to work was to fabricate the excuse for the next strike ? I lived in a region which pretended to build cars when they could be bothered. That after the Miners' Strike- called over pay, incidentally, could have been resolved, Scargill decided to keep the miners out to try to bring down the government ? And that miners who tried to return to work were intimidated and in some cases killed ?
Privatisation of our overmanned, unproductive state industries- I was in one- led to increases in economic growth and industrial output (it grew between '79 and '97), and the situation was only reversed by Brown putting millions of people into non-jobs in a self-serving, ineffective public sector to provide safe Labour votes, and crippling our economy for decades to come.
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JohnK | 31 Jul 2012 8:36 pm
Autobulb. Check your history. The Conservative party, led by Maggie chose to break the stranglehold the unions had on all mineworkers and many other industries. As an added note, check closer and you will find Labour closed twice as many coal mines as the Tories.
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JohnK | 31 Jul 2012 8:41 pm
Anon. What you say is entirely true. Every Labour government since the 40's has taken an essentially healthy economy and turned it into a nightmare of control freakery and poor fiscal management. Take as a for instance Brown selling our Gold reserves at the bottom of a rising market and below going rate! What short memories so many labourites have.
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Anonymous | 1 Aug 2012 3:15 pm
JohnK; amazingly, I think you are being a little unfair to Labour, but have got the main points right; in the early '70's, they inherited a basket case of an economy, after Heath had been unable to recover from the mess Labour left him. So, they didn't create the chaos that time, but were unable to fix it. In my lifetime, the only true economic success has been under the Tories from '79 onwards, when, not being interested in anything just to provide employment, our manufacturing industry, while employing less people, ended up actually producing more by '97. Margaret Thatcher, our true Champion of manufacturing. Who'd have thought ?
And Labourites don't have short memories, they just ignore or change any part of history that shows their failure. See "A Brief History of the Labour Party", which states Michael Foot's support for the Falklands task Force, when of course Labour opposed the retaking of the Falklands at every turn.
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Anonymous | 2 Aug 2012 8:29 am
Bet the miners with their massive pay increases through the 70's all bought British Cars ? No, they were as selfish as the members of other tribalist Unions, remembering of course the strikes they called during WWII as well. It was their choice to try and take down a Government which really ended their gravy train.
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JohnK | 3 Aug 2012 5:50 pm
Anon - Unfair to Labour. Is that possible?
I recall (yes, I am that old) Arthur Scargill with his cabal of union heads changing the rules so he became the life president of the union, rather than a democratically elected one. How's that for the true face of socialism. He even drove some members to form a breakaway union. Add a passing mention of the £1/2m that was contributed to our 'starving' miners by Eastern bloc unions and which I believe has never been properly accounted for.
Sorry Anon, but I stand by what I say about Labour party supporters having short memories.
Someone described 'Tone and Gordy' as subjecting this country to 'Creeping Collectivisation'. A good description of Labour's aims perhaps.
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