Unmade in Britain: we’re becoming a zero-industrial society

The French sociologist Alain Touraine coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ in 1969. By the 1980s it had become shorthand for the kind of services-based, individualistic economies most major developed nations had created. Today, the UK is moving its economy beyond that. We are creating what might be called a ‘zero-industrial society’. Climate change targets, soaring energy prices and rising taxes on employment are killing off Britain’s small and vibrant industrial base.

Last week, Ineos closed its ethanol plant in Grangemouth, Scotland, with its chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe warning of ‘the extinction of our major industries’. The previous month, Airbus announced it was cutting 500 jobs. In October, JCB cut 230 jobs; in July Dyson said it was cutting a third of its British workforce. These companies are examples of brilliantly successful British manufacturers with a global presence. If they can’t make things here, what hope is there for less successful rivals? In recent months, Vauxhall has closed British plants and the steelworks at Port Talbot have been consigned to history, as has the appliance maker Hotpoint, which shut a factory in Bristol in October, leaving a century of history behind.

Do we want to embrace deindustrialisation as a consequence of net zero?

British manufacturing, which had been broadly stable at around 8 per cent of GDP, faces a full-scale collapse. Worse still, Keir Starmer’s government, for all its talk of an ‘industrial strategy’ and of creating the fastest-growing economy in the G7, appears to be doing everything it can to eliminate manufacturing as completely as possible.

The figures make for sobering reading. The output of the chemicals industry is down 38 per cent since 2021. Cement manufacturing is down 40 per cent over the same period, electrical equipment down 50 per cent. Overall industrial output is down by 10 per cent since the pandemic. Make UK, the trade body for the manufacturing industry, recently revealed that the UK has, for the first time, dropped out of the top ten countries for making stuff.