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Who Really Destroyed Britain?
“Men in cloth caps and overalls built this country; men in suits with briefcases destroyed it.”
That quotation appeared on a meme on Facebook recently, shared by a friend who wants the UK to leave the EU. She was not impressed by my response in the comments: “And then the EU came to the rescue.”
There is, of course, an underlying truth in the statement. It’s relevance to the EU, or the UK voting public’s wish to leave that institution, is hard to see, however.
What the author of the statement was really referring to was the UK’s manufacturing industries. But the “men in suits” that destroyed it were nothing to do with the EU.
In order to explain I need to delve into my own past as an Engineer working in British manufacturing. I spent all of the 1970s and most of the ’80s working for what was then a modestly successful British conglomerate with interests across the UK and further afield. Most of the managers in that company were professionals in disciplines other than management. Where I worked, in a plant where the product we manufactured was based on a chemical process, the managers had doctorates in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. As young men they had been part of the team that developed the process, now they were overseeing its translation into…