Britain's Industrial Collapse: Death by Policy, Neglect, and Wishful Thinking

A decade ago, the UK was still holding a respectable 10% of GDP from manufacturing - on par with France, today it's just a downward trend for Britain...

Vehicle production and cement production have both fallen back to the levels of the 1950s. Factories are shuttering, skills evaporating, whole towns quietly ageing into redundancy. And this isn't just a tale of 80s Britain, it's an ongoing trend...

And the causes? Some cyberattacks here, some global competition there, but mostly it's the fact that Britain has simply made it punishingly expensive to produce anything on home soil.

The mounting costs of British manufacturing

There are many....

• Business rates are so archaic and punitive they make council tax look modern.
• mployer levies which load cost on to payrolls rather than productivity.
• Landfill taxes that hit any business producing physical goods.
• Carbon pricing, which is well-intentioned but has drastically increased energy bills.

As a result of the above UK industrial energy prices now run at 2× France and 4× the USA.

That alone is enough to eliminate competitiveness. No CEO looks at that and thinks: Yes, let’s build a new plant in Birmingham rather than Ohio.

It's not that Britain can't make things anymore - it's that the government has steadily removed any rational reason to.

The Great Unravelling of the Skilled Workforce

Every time a factory closes, Britain doesn't just lose output - it loses a generation of expertise. Engineers, toolmakers, machine operators, materials specialists: the careers that made the country rich.

Many are taking early retirement or drifting into unrelated jobs because there is simply nowhere left for them to earn a decent wage in their sectors in the UK.

And once those skills go, they don’t come back. You can't retrain a lost industrial ecosystem with a bunch of new T-Levels...

Final Thoughts

Britain has drifted into deindustrialisation through a mix of high costs, confused policy, green levies without compensatory investment, and an inability to think long-term, rather than a planned transition toward high-tech specialisms.

Unless there's a radical rethink — on energy, tax, infrastructure, and industrial policy — the UK won't just decline; it will hollow out!