Letters: What we lose when we lose our factories

Chains of command

Sir: Matthew Lynn is correct to emphasise the economic dangers of deindustrialisation (‘Not made in Britain’, 25 January). But there are cultural dangers too. It’s now 40 years since Correlli Barnett and I made a television programme called Assembled in Britain, drawing attention to the alarming retreat of manufacturing. No recent government has respected, still less encouraged, manufacturing industry. The result is today’s mess.

What can you say about a civilisation that cannot produce the goods it needs, other than that civilisation loses integrity and pride? In 1944 Matthew King wrote a small classic called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering, pointing out that manufacturing civilisations were daily able to demonstrate the valuable relationship between effort and reward and that they were required to maintain respectful chains of command. Every MP should read this.

We have a lot to learn from factories, but maybe it really is too late. There aren’t many left.

Stephen Bayley

London SW8

Unconservative Tories

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Rod Liddle

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Douglas Murray

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Katy Balls

The Tory party’s wannabe comeback kids

Sir: In his article on Pierre Poilievre (‘Crunch time’, 25 January), James Heale quotes one of the Canadian’s advisers as saying that the base of his party is ‘considerably more conservative’ than that of British Conservatives. This is wrong. The base of the British Conservative party is deeply conservative. The problem lay with the party’s MPs, who, time and time again, ignored their core supporters – resulting in record high taxes, uncontrolled immigration and financially ruinous ‘green’ policies. Some of them even conspired to overturn the result of the European Referendum.

This drift to the left was exacerbated by the David Cameron-style A-list imposed upon the local associations. The result of this so-called ‘modernisation’ can be seen both in the catastrophic 2024 general election result and in the rise of Reform.