You can't really opt out of globalisation. People who tried it in the past failed, viz communist Russia and its acolytes, or as Neil Ferguson points out in Civilisation, China under the emperors. You can't really think that a return to protectionist policies and tarifs would be a good idea? The only real way of doing it intelligently is to police corporations in a draconian manner so that products from major polluters, or those with unfair wage structures are not allowed to enter the country or indeed are hit with swingeing tarifs. Those are two areas where goods undercut local production in an unfair way. You can produce anything cheaper if you employ slave labour and care not a job about the environment. Other than that, the internet especially has made globalisation inevitable. Information is now global, as is finance and trade. The only hope is not to opt out of the competition, but identify niches which you can occupy more successfully than your competitors. It's not as if Europe and the UK have to fail at this. Germany proves you can be a heavily-exporting Western country with a trade surplus. Taking your ball home and refusing the play the game is no answer to anything. This is of course unrelated to the "need" for a federalist Europe. Corporations do now set the agenda. They continually threaten relocation to somewhere else whenever anyone tries to make them play by fairer rules. What is required is global cooperation on what those rules are, but that is immensely difficult as countries looks to their own short-term interest. The UK is of course just as much to blame as anywhere else by demanding that its unfair finance industry be allowed to continue as before to the detriment of everywhere apart from the UK exchequer.
Agree 100% We have to deal with the world as it is and not how we would like it to be. I think future generations will have it tough. My generation, the tail end of the baby boomers, benefitted enormously from the wealth created from the expansion of world trade but we have also run up enormous debts for future generations, this is why the rich are richer and the middle is being squeezed. We have all benefitted but some have benefitted significantly more than most. It is an experiment that has never been tried before and it is debatable whether it can continue for much longer.
I agree with you Glidd, but... The Italians did it in the '70s and maybe until the '80s. Under the rules in place at the time, companies such as Vespa, Olivetti and and to an extent, Fiat, Ferrari and MV were protected by import restrictions. You could argue that the quality of those products could have been improved by competition with Honda, IBM etc., but you could also point at British companies such as Norton and Triumph, which did not have such blocks on competition and failed as a result of not being able to raise their game in time.
Thing is, Norton and Triumph were turning out fairly shoddy products which had been left behind by the competition. Had they been protected, would they have fared any better? Maybe they were complacent. BL also produced shoddy products, but you saw them on the streets everywhere. Did they improve their game? No. If I remember correctly, however, the Japanese motorcycle industry was subsidised in the beginning allowing them to break into new markets. Maybe this sort of unfairness is a good thing if you've got a great product rather than a crappy one. It enables the plant to grow when it is weak and feeble. If you look closely at the US, despite paying lip service to free trade, they tend to hand out subsidies to any of their industrial areas that can't actually win.
BL was not exactly helped by Red Robbo who wanted the factory run for the benefit of his trades union members rather than the BL customers. Oh, sorry, that was another Daily Mail moment. Doesn't make it any less true though.
Well, Red Robbo and his ilk might not have helped in the making of the cars, but you can't deny that they mainly looked like cak and had no real USPs. That wasn't his fault. And as has been pointed out, the whole them and us, management and unions thing wasn't the best way of doing business. One of the reasons that the German car industry was so successful was that the management and workforce actually felt they were on the same side. It does take two to start an argument.
I think that's unlikely to have been the case. Both Norton and Triumph were failing companies a long time before the wreckage of them had been bolted together in the 70s to form NVT. In fact successful companies usually pay good dividends, AND invest significantly in R&D. Norton was swallowed up in the 50s by AMC, who subseqeuntly failed, and Triumph by BSA, who also failed. There's an interesting history here: Untitled Document It looks to me as if management incompetence was the main factor in BSAs demise - with the usual story of excessive diversification and investment in the wrong "bright ideas" so that they could no longer make the right decisions about the products that had been their bread and butter. The staggering thing about Honda is that it took only around 10 years (from 1948 to 1959) for the company to grow from nothing to the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. There's no way that could have been done, subsidies or not, without some brilliance in product design and production quality (at that time, just small bikes of course - something that the British manufacturers seemed to have contempt for).
sorry but I disagree, the reason they were failing companies by the 1970's goes back to the damage had been done long before and can be traced back to the 1950's when they stopped developing new motors, The triumph twin can trace its design back to 1936, Norton twin to 1948 and the bsa twin to 1939 (but not produced until 1946) sadly very little in the way of new designs or anything else happened after this and what were once world leaders became museum pieces Even the Triumph trident that had a prototype build around 1963 but did not see the light of day until 1968/69, was hardly a new design being basically a speed twin with another cylinder grafted onto it. If you have never read Bert Hopwoods book What Happened to the British Bike Industry it makes interesting reading, some of the ideas he floated around 1970 that were ignored were copied very successfully 20 years later by John Bloor
As I have mentioned before, for every debit there is a credit, and when you speak of "enormous debts" you could say with equal validity that we have run up "enormous assets". At a national level, if it is your opinion that the increase in both debts and assets is a bad thing - well that is a legitimate point of view (although many would not agree). If you are suggest that debts somehow come into existence in a vacuum, without any corresponding assets, then perhaps you would think it through again.
