A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin Read Free Book Online Page B

blamed the Common Market for their ruin.
    In Yorkshire and Lancashire the textile industry finally succumbed to cheap and inferior imports from Taiwan and South Korea. Calls for import controls, delegations to ministries and mass lobbies of Parliament fell upon deaf ears. Men from ministries on index-linked pensions came and looked at the books. It was, they said, a tough old world. If textile workers in Bolton could not compete with those in Taipei and Seoul they would have to go down the plughole.
    There was some brave resistance. Scattered work-ins, here and there attempts to set up a co-operative, but there was never really any hope. In the end the textile industry followed shipbuilding and fishing into history.
    This did little to damage the political base of the National Unity government. Textiles, ships and fish were the products of Labour strongholds. Elsewhere the belief was widespread that only the inefficient, the idle and the greedy were unemployed, a belief fostered by the popular newspapers. For a time one of Sir George Fison’s newspapers even ran a ‘Scrounger of the Week’ competition, urging people to spy upon unemployed neighbours and offering cash prizes to those who could uncover the most outrageous fiddles.
    The collapse of British Leyland was the beginning of the end. Leyland had been the country’s biggest export earner and largest employer. One November morning the chairman of Leyland had appeared at the Department of Industry to tell the Secretary of State that his company could no longer service its debts, never mind finance further investment. He needed an extra £500 million immediately and probably the same again next year.
    There were emergency Cabinet meetings, a frantic round of negotiations with a Japanese corporation, but in the end the cupboard was bare and most of British Leyland wasallowed to go to the wall. The bus and truck company was sold to the Japanese. The Rover plant went to Volkswagen of Germany who promptly turned it into an assembly plant for one of its own models. The collapse of Leyland also triggered off a wave of bankruptcies which swept through components firms in the Midlands. At last the crisis began to lap at the edge of the Unity government’s political base.
    The third element in the disaster which overtook Britain in the late 1980s was that North Sea oil began to dry up. For most of the previous decade Britain had been self-sufficient in oil. This meant that, besides not having to spend precious foreign exchange importing oil, the government also received huge revenue from the taxes on the profits of the oil companies. In a sane world this temporary good fortune might have been used to provide industry with the investment funds so badly needed. However, most of the oil revenue was squandered on tax cuts designed to buy favour with the electorate.
    As domestic oil supplies dwindled Britain was obliged to go back on to the world markets to purchase oil again. It is true that by this time scientists had succeeded in converting sugar cane and other vegetable matter into a substitute for oil, but it was not yet being produced in anything like commercial quantities. Britain’s import bill began to increase dramatically. A balance of payments crisis meant that the foreign holders of sterling would start selling. So too would domestic holders, since they were no longer bound by exchange controls.
    For those engaged in certain forms of non-productive activity life had never been so good. As money poured out of manufacturing industry, more became available for speculation in commodities, property and works of art. Because the supply of these was relatively limited and the amount of cash chasing them was for all practical purposes unlimited, what went up was not supply, but prices. The value of gold soared; coffee, rubber, tin and a host of other commodities fluctuated wildly as fortunes were won and lost by those who could afford to gamble in