REFLECTIONS 2011 - Part 2.

REFLECTIONS 2001 – Part two.
The urge to write this “reflection” began like the last one with a TV show.
”Top Gear” is whimsy and satire and it pokes fun at the pretensions of car enthusiasts. The world-wide audience was big enough for a 60 Minutes feature. The three hosts are funny, whimsical, irreverent, erratic, and completely unpredictable. The irony is that they really love cars. But they are not even a little shy to tell us when a car is a rotten deal. They can actually scoff at BMW and sometimes Audi, and often Volkswagen.

What brought me to this piece, is another demonstration of how the once-high are brought low. The three went on one of their laughing-all-the-way rallies with three relics from the defunct British Leyland, a Rover, an Austin Princess, and another I couldn’t identify. What came to me was the sad story of irreversible decline of a once-proud industrial economy. British: Leyland was an archetypical example of everything that went wrong with British industry.In the 60s, the British government, recognizing that their car industry was going down the drain, did a shotgun marriage between Leyland, a still prosperous company, and another company that was an amalgamation of the failing Austin, Morris, and Triumph companies.

"Top Gear" rallied with three vintage 70s models. They laughed and joked as the cars failed, fell apart, and generally malfunctioned. In one hilarious scene one of the cars literally fell to pieces – the bumper fell off, a door went flying, the hood (pardon me – bonnet) disappeared. Of course I laughed, at the fun. I laughed, but inside a cried a little.

Great Britain was, for more than 150 years, the dominant world power. At the heart of its success in building empire and creating world markets, was the Industrial Revolution. Nothing, empire-building, a dominant navy, a reasonably decent political system, nothing could equal the power reaped from the revolution in methods of production. Why was Britain so far ahead of the rest of the world? Put too simply perhaps was that the country had a virtually unlimited supply of coal, the fuel that made the steam that powered the machines, and an empire that brought an endless supply of raw materials.

It is a sad irony for me, Anglophile supreme, to realize that the country where the Industrial Revolution began; the country that used its resources and resourcefulness to build an empire with their booming industrial base, had simply broken down. There was a time when British-made meant the ne plus ultra of excellence. From the looms and spinning machines invented by English and Scots came a domination of the textile industry, using raw cotton from their colonies. From their machine shops came engines unsurpassed anywhere. From their Clyde-side shipyards came, not only the most powerful navy in the world, but the finest luxury ocean liners. Britain had rail systems when other countries still used horse drawn stage coaches. The English were supreme in cars, followed perhaps by the French and Germans. They dominated that sector until America discovered assembly lines and cars for the working man. But for every ten thousand Tin Lizzies on the road, there was one majestic Rolls Royce, hand-made in every detail. The world standard might arguably be given to the Germans who, with Daimler-Benz were the first, but no one built any motorized luxury like the Brits.


Post WW2 the country was in industrial and economic decline. In the 1950s a British government parliamentary committee examined declining productivity and its loss of world markets. The economy had been devastated by two world wars. In fact, when Britain, totally unprepared for it, declared war on Germany in 1939, it has still not repaid its debt from the first war. They went from a domination of industrial output during the 19th century, to a wasting away of that output by the end of WW2. To illustrate: In 1880 the UK accounted for 41.1% of the world’s manufactured products but by 1913 this had decreased to 11%. The skid was unstoppable. The parliamentary committee announced that the country’s historic success had become an illusion. It had had fostered an attitude of indifference and a belief that whatever happened, the British way would prosper. There was entrenched wealth, but very little innovation. The British aircraft industry, which had been third to only the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was living on the fading glories of Avro and Rolls Royce, the domination of the Spitfire, Hurricane, and Lancaster bomber.

Enough history. Two items present themselves to me, one is serious the other the “Top Gear” reflection of the British supremacy in satire and whimsy. First, and most recently, there was the spectacular failure of the Rolls Royce engine in the Airbus super-jumbo. The other one is the utter decay of the British Motor Industry, once a guiding light for car lovers everywhere. Trouble was, the Brits continued to believe in their cars long after the rest of the world had given up on them.

I went through my English care “phase.” Many of us did. I had a cranky Standard Triumph and I even tried an aging Vauxhall. My comedy partner Garry had his fling. He owned an Austin Healey which looked good, but which, according to him malfunctioned in most weather and came to a stop if it rolled over anything as small as an empty cigarette package. In later years he clung tenaciously to a Jaguar sedan which declined all effort to start in damp or cold weather.

The famous English brands did not disappear. The Mini, which was Austin’s last gasp at success, became one of today’s stars but built by BMW. Similarly the Rolls Royce car is made by a German company. The motorcycle business, once beloved of all bike riders, disappeared. The kick-start engine of the old Triumph (and countless other models) simply could not match the battery-driven starter of Honda, Kawasaki, or Suzuki. In the U.S. Harley survived only when the government bailed them out. (Sadly, Harley has moved its production from its original home, a great way to say thanks to the American public whose taxes bailed it out. But that’s business.)


Slowly it unraveled. English cars wouldn’t run in extreme weather conditions and were cranky to start in any morning that was cold, or wet. I had a Volvo in 1957. In those days Volvo was cobbled together from parts taken from other cars. I loved it. But it had a Lucas ignition system and was often unpredictable in unusual weather. Perhaps the real trouble was that, having been so dominant for so many years, they would cling stubbornly to obsolescent systems. We used to take a couple of weeks every winter in Barbados. So would many thousand people from England. I got into a conversation with one of them and commented on the English failure to build a car that could be successfully exported to places with less predictable weather. He snorted. Literally. “We still make the greatest cars.” Years later, with the same attitude, the Big Three saw their markets shrinking under the onslaught of well-made, inexpensive (and at the time not really very good) Japanese cars. General Motors could be heard with “Americans will never buy those little cars. We’re the ones they want.” It was that stubbornness that laid them low. It was the same stubbornness that did an even more dramatic killing of British motors. (Sidebar: during my 3 months in Paris, one of the really literate French guides joked about why the French car industry failed to succeed with exports to America. His own father scorned air-conditioning, but he ruefully admitted, Americans wanted comfort and the French didn't give it to them.)

But the New World was not immune from obsolescence. U.S. Steel, and the others – like Bethlehem, the dominant players, suddenly found themselves challenged by better quality, lower prices, and superb salesmanship from other countries. Just as only the ghost of the car industry exists in places like Coventry, the ghost of the steel industry lives in enormous empty steel plants in what we now call the “rust belt.” (Which should certainly anger Canadians since Big Steel has turned its back on Hamilton after promising a prosperous future.)

Today, America suffers from the same malaise that undermined British industry. “We are the best. Our workers are the most skilled. Our factories are world-class.” Sound familiar? Self-delusion, since the ambitions of the Asian Tigers and the resurgent Chinese, are at the root of the failure to compete.

And as I said in the last piece, the people seem to think that what is best for them is to retreat to happier times, voting for political reactionaries. Turning the clock back simply doesn’t work.

I repeat, nothing I have written in these two somewhat gloomy blogs – is new. I have assembled information and come to conclusions. Remarkably Canada stands aloof, insulated from reality by our virtually unlimited resources. Like sending feedstock i.e. raw crude oil from the Oil Sands to U.S. refineries so their economic engine can keep working. But that, as I always say – is another story.