Industry | 2010.01.03
The art of industry | Jonathan Glancey
Mandelson\'s rejection of so-called smokestack manufacturing lacks vision. We need steel
"I\'m unashamedly talking about the reindustrialisation of the British economy," Peter Mandelson, minister with a Stakhanovite production of portfolios, told the Guardian earlier this month, "but not by going back to the old smokestack manufacturing past; we know we can\'t turn the clock back."
This interview, a sign of the government\'s newfound interest in establishing a solid base for the economy after the collapse of the febrile financial sector, was published the day before Corus announced it was to mothball its Teesside steel plant with a loss of 1,700 skilled jobs. Mandelson himself expressed a degree of concern for the Teesside workers, many of whom had worked for Corus, or its predecessor, British Steel, for more than 30 years. However, as theirs were "old smokestack" jobs, their loss is presumably an end to a tattered, grimy and best-forgotten chapter in industrial history.
Britain is no longer a great manufacturing nation. Our economy is reliant on the rollercoaster world of services and the endless growth of the retail sector. How we will become a hi-tech neomanufacturing nation, given the decline of industrial culture, is a mystery. Doubtless other ministers will pop out of the titanium panelling to preach the gospel of scientific, digital manufacturing and to condemn "old-fashioned" industry.
What, though, is the problem with traditional manufacturing? With making steel, ships and locomotives as well as gadgets? If you walk through Helsinki, one of the world\'s most hi-tech cities, you will see huge ships under construction in yards cheek by jowl with the latest art galleries, restaurants and studios of designers and architects at the leading edge of their professions.
In Stuttgart and Munich, you will find industrial manufacturing celebrated in some of the world\'s most innovative museums and galleries. Making things, as many people outside Britain believe, is an art. Who would be so ungenerous as to argue that the Queen Mary or the Flying Scotsman weren\'t works of art? Industrial art. Made by the very same breed of workers who forged steel for Corus at Teesside.
Manufacturing is not simply about brute or emergency economics. It\'s also about a sense of involvement and achievement engendered by shaping and crafting useful, interesting, well-designed things. In becoming a nation primarily of consumers, we have all but lost this sense of being creative and responsible producers. The idea of having to make things with our hands has come to be seen as beneath us, a task best left to stoic Finns, industrious Germans, and, of course, the Chinese, who make so much for us for so very little.
When the global economy picks up again, there will be a demand for the high-quality steels Corus made on Teesside, along with the ships and trains and cranes that will load and ferry machinery and goods worldwide. But we will have relegated the skilled workers to a jobless underclass.
The government\'s new fascination with manufacturing seems superficial. The economy has been slow to recover from the recession not least because its manufacturing base has been so weakened. Looking in hope to a new hi-tech producing economy will not provide sufficient foundations for a stable future. We need steel, physically and metaphorically, to support the fragile bones of our economy. We need active producers rather than passive consumers. Sadly, we dismiss our steelworkers and run down the manufacturing our European neighbours find rewarding, while we flirt with a new manufacturing future based on political manouevring rather than common sense.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]stry-britain-economic-recovery
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