Going down for the third time

As the 100th anniversary of the First World War approaches, let’s remember that Empire was the root of Britain’s industrial decline.

After two wars and four decades of torpor, Britain has finally woken up to the idea that most of its industries now face oblivion. Assessing recent books on the problem, this essay explains why graphic designers, at least, have nothing to worry about.

The literature of Britain’s industrial decline is now so long, so voluminous, that most of today’s articles open with an attempt to find a still earlier nineteenth-century symptom of, or official report on it. The story is always the same: we are a nation incapable of taking matters of Production and Design atoll seriously. The latest version is The audit of war, by Corelli Barnett (Macmillan, £14.95).

Mr Barnett’s innovation has been to cast the Second World War as the high tide of Britain’s anti-industrial culture. The choice of this period is an excel­lent one, for there can be no doubt that the total industrial mobilisation which spanned the years 1939-45 is the formative experience of the twentieth century, for Britain as for many other countries. However, Barnett’s audit of the Second World War is itself wanting. The archival material here trawled is wonderful, and there are some telling passages. But the overall account is partial and so, in my view, are most of the past few years’ con­tributions on Britain’s decline.

For Barnett, Gordon Russell, founder of today’s Design Council,  was a ‘cottagey’ kind of furniture designer, one symptom among many of Britain’s lack of a ‘coherent corporate strategy’. For. the American academic Martin Wiener, in his English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit 1850-1980 (Penguin, £3.95), William Morris was, as he is for Stephen Bayley, a cipher for British fascination with rural values at the expense of machine-based ones. Anyway, you picks your designer as target, according to your preferred period.

Why has Barnett’s book been the subject of a minor furore? He has published at a useful moment. Recent events – the Sikorski/Westland affair, the General Motors/BL affair – have renewed public interest in the politics of production and design. Through his book, Barnett has put in an eloquent plea for more dirigiste state intervention in these areas. There is here a clear nod to Michael HeseItine’s call for a ‘Super-Department of Industry’, one which can for the first time begin to rivaI the Treasury in terms of clout.

Barnett has contributed to the New Statesman before now, so there is also a Kinnockish ‘Party of Production’ air to what he writes. Yet the following targets are singled out for a hatred which Neil Kinnock cannot match: the middle classes; the public schools and Oxbridge; the working class, and the welfare state.

Barnett hates William Beveridge. He, like John Logie Baird, was cranky, idealistic: ‘not one of the leading New Jerusalemers was an engineer, an industrialist or a trade unionist,’ says Barnett, dolefully, though I am not sure he is any of those three himself. But be certain of this: the Spitfire might have been a better plane than the Messerschmitt, but that was only because the Americans, through Lend Lease, financed its exorbitant production costs (airframes at 13,000 man-hours each, as against 4000 for Messerschmitts); and because it was designed to win wars.