Rob, I understand your sarcasm, but it is not always that simple. Sometimes business owners close one place not because they are losing money, but because they can make more money somewhere else (e.g., third world). That's the "secret" behind the latest "rich getting richer" wave going on right now, while the majorities of Western populations are experiencing the worst decline since the Great Depression. I do not know enough about the Thatcher England to discern which was which, it is quite possible that it was simply an inevitable obsolescence of old industries. But I do know that in the past your boys used to burn crops (to preserve higher market prices), while millions were dying of hunger nearby.
Far be it from me to defend the plausibility of Stamper's dream, but the opposite ain't that simple as you portray it to be either.
Fair enough, Slobodan, location moves do happen because of economically driven factors too.
In the case of stamper’s bête noire, Maggie T, most of Scotland’s shipyards were closed because they had simply become redundant. They were already dead on their feet, and only the ‘workers’ didn’t seem to realise that. Private ownership and its investment potential was ever hindered by union militancy (I ran the gauntlet of that militancy, as an affected apprentice, during the infamous apprentices’ strike of 1959 - or was it early 1960?) and huge amounts of basic ignorance and impoverished education provided fertile and unquestioning ground for the development of communist ideology. And I use the term intentionally. Not socialist, communist. In today’s papers, Miliband, the union-sponsored leader of the UK’s Labour opposition party of the day, has been publicly embarrassed by union manipulation of local political candidate selections up in Scotland. So much so that he has announced that the party is reconsidering its position vis-à-vis its union association, the very association that provides most of its war chest, and ruins its possible appeal to non-union people and potential voters.
But anyway, back to the yards. Shipbuilding peaked as costs in Britain rose and yards in France, Germany and then the Far East could manage to build bigger cheaper. Good, more reasoned labour relations in some of those lands meant that deliveries could be maintained without financially ruinous penalty clauses being implemented. That, coupled with the huge rise in the change from boat to air travel, meant that the day of the boat in Britain was up.
(Regarding the coal mines: same story there. It was dirty, labour intensive, relatively expensive and logistically a friggin’ nightmare, as anyone who remembers buying a ton of coal and storing it somewhere, setting and cleaning fireplaces every day will know. Oil, electricity and gas were the modern answers to the heating and energy problems. The country took a shower and cleaned up.)
So, when the yards could no longer be kept open with private money, the ones that didn’t vanish found themselves effectively nationalised, the huge political fake being that the industry no longer remained a private money sink but a public one. So that was okay, then. The fake jobs continued apace. Until the money ran out.
Unfortunately, just as with film and digital, with my own business in bespoke calendar production, times change and the reasons why some businesses are able to thrive simply evaporate. Sure I don’t like it either, but reality forces me to accept reality. Blaming other people or politics (other than PC!) for my problems serves no purpose and, ultimately, just gets in the way of seeing new paths forward, for which I can personally vouch too.
The indigenous car industry in Britain is so well documented, both its rise and its fall, that it serves no purpose re-reporting it here! All you need do for a start is check out Red Robbo!
But hell, what’s the point? The blind will never see and the wilfully so observe even less than the naturally afflicted.
Rob C