From the envy of the world to Broken Britain, where did it all go wrong? - Sir Andrew Cook

But today, over 30 years after her retirement from politics, we are once again in decline. Strikes disrupt our railways, hospitals and schools. Inflation gnaws at our money. Our infrastructure crumbles. Nothing works as it should. What went wrong?

To answer this question I have to go back not 50, but 70 years, to the 1950s. Sheffield, the city of my birth, was a thriving international metropolis, the global capital of special steels, hand tools and cutlery and a manufacturing centre of importance.

Sheffield boasted good grammar schools, an excellent red-brick university, some fine parks, libraries and museums and impressive transport services. The annual feast of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire hosted royalty and prime ministers.

But beneath this optimistic outlook lurked fundamental weaknesses. Almost since the beginning of the British-inspired industrial revolution, the country had encouraged the development of overseas markets. Britain’s empire provided willing buyers for British-made goods and those imperial domains looked to the mother country to purchase their raw materials. A mutual dependency flourished. But as the 19th century turned into the 20th and other nations beyond the empire established their own industries, this dependency became unhealthy.

Britain’s dependency on coal was an additional weakness. Since the 1800s, immense coal reserves had powered its industry and filled its coffers. But by the 1960s, global shipping was no longer driven by British coal and two world wars had exhausted its gold reserves. Oil was now the world’s main fuel, and Britain didn’t have any. Elsewhere, expanding steel and electrical industries hungrily sought dollar-denominated commodities of which Britain had none.The greenback replaced sterling as the world’s reserve currency.

But we weren’t dead yet. During the 1950s, posters had appeared around the country with slogans such as “Britain Leads the World in Shipbuilding”, “...in Nuclear Power”, ...in Aviation” and so on. Much of this was true, and had the country managed to capitalise as it had previously, it might have refilled its coffers. But fate was against it.

Firstly, Japan, reconstructed by post-war American aid and taking advantage of crippling trade union demarcations in British shipyards, cornered the shipbuilding market.

With aircraft, the war had left the country with a plethora of unsustainable manufacturers and the industry shrunk to near extinction.

The story was the same in other industries. The world ceased to beat a path to Britain’s doors.

Victory in two world wars may have bought peace, but at an enormous price. Emerging nearly bankrupt in 1945, Britain was forced aside by a surging USA with its products, commodities and all-conquering dollar. Near-luddite trade unions made matters worse. By the early 1960s, decline had set in. By the 1970s, it had become precipitous.

The Thatcher years were boosted by economic advantages. The discovery of North Sea oil eliminated Britain’s dependency on imported oil and turned the pound into a solid petrocurrency. The curtailment of trade unions eliminated the constant strikes. The ‘big bang’ turned the City into the world’s foremost financial centre. The privatisation of ‘lame duck’ industries ridded the taxpayer of many fiscal burdens. But at the same time, manufacturing was dying on its feet. Subsidies, coupled with ‘imperial preference’ trade arrangements, had made it weak, inefficient and uncompetitive.

Factory after factory was bulldozed, to be replaced by shopping centres. But still, the Thatcher era benefits outweigh the drawbacks, at least for the time being.

And then they were progressively squandered. Rather than husbanding oil revenues in a sovereign wealth fund, as did Norway, they were wasted on welfare and a ravenous NHS.

A tax system which had encouraged work, enterprise and thrift metamorphosed into one that did the opposite.

The ambition to own a house became increasingly unreachable, due to planning laws and nimbyism. British people began to feel poorer.

In an act of self-harm, they voted to leave the European Union, the one large and prosperous market still freely available for British goods and services.

Today, the North Sea oil has run out, the single market has gone, and to cap it all, the Covid pandemic, imported from China, has largely destroyed the British work ethic and replaced it with a sense of entitlement and state-dependency. Even Thatcher’s privatisations haven’t been universally successful.

That’s why it’s all gone wrong. Will it go right again? I don’t see how it can.

And what of Sheffield? It’s now a worn-out and largely forgotten backwater, with little manufacturing industry, poor trains and a short-lived airport, since closed. At least it still has a few nice parks.

Sir Andrew Cook is a British industrialist.