Carryfast:
Rjan:
[…]
You’ve contradicted yourself in saying on one hand it was the oil crisis which did it not Brit industrial strife and then on the other that it was Germany’s better industrial relations which was the over riding factor in the fortunes of the German economy not the oil crisis.Also don’t recognise your idea that their economy also wasn’t out performing ours bearing in mind it was Callaghan who had to go begging to the IMF not the Germans.
No I’m saying the reason why the Germans didn’t experience so much industrial ructions in the 70s was because they had better relations to start with. Workers in this country basically refused to pay a single penny of the increased oil cost, and flexed their muscle to make it so, which is why inflation took off, whereas I suspect in Germany the bosses were able to go to the unions and say “listen, costs have gone up for external reasons, we need to work together to absorb them”, and basically German workers sustained below-inflation pay rises for a few years because they trusted the bosses more.
With British bosses, workers had spent the entire 1960s walking out (or being locked out) at the drop of a hat (partly because there was already a culture amongst bosses of casual, at-will employment, which is why the Labour government introduced compulsory notice periods in the 1960s to try and clamp down on walkouts and lockouts), and Heath in the early 70s had already unnecessarily provoked both inflation and industrial trouble (which is what led to his “Who governs?” gambit).
Then you’ve said that Callaghan’s regime wasn’t Socialist.When I’ve posted a documented example of Heffer having to defend himself ( and by inference Benn and Shore ) that he wasn’t taking a Nationalist line ( when he/they clearly was/were taking a Nationalist line he/they just didn’t know it although I suspect Shore at least did ) against Callaghan’s and Jenkins’ correct statements that it was they who were taking the Socialist line.
But nobody disputes that the likes of Benn were amongst the most left-wing in the Labour party.
Which you’ve then confirmed yourself by going along with their bs policy of handing over British oil stocks to the Germans to help them to ride out the economic storm caused by the Arab oil embargo and resulting price escalation.
Well, to be more precise, the stocks were sold to the Germans at the excruciatingly high market prices of the time, rather than “handed over”. And the fact is that oil exports under Callaghan did decrease, but the point I’m making against you is a much larger one, that this idea of just turning off the taps to other nations (without even the pretense of trying to share based on some notion of fairness or industrial priority, whether politically determined or through the market mechanism) would be an appallingly badly judged policy - because you’d put nations like Germany (and others, like Japan) back in the situation they were pre-WW2, of saying that they have to launch outright wars to have any hope of getting access to the basic raw materials their economies and people need. Whatever basis upon which raw materials are shared, it cannot be on that basis, because it’s the purest possible motive for war, imperial expansion, and territorial struggles, in which your opponents have nothing possible to lose and everything to gain.
When the fact is that most of the guys in politics at the time had been on the fronts fighting precisely such a war for precisely such reasons, it’s easy to see why they weren’t going to go down that road.
While Brit workers were hit with wage cuts and job losses,ironically including massive transfer of jobs from Brit car plants to German ones in the case of Ford and GM.So who was actually shafting who in that grubby deal.While you’ve then got the nerve to say that if we’d have kept our own oil stocks to insulate our own economy,at the expense of the EU ( Germany ) then they would have hit us.Exactly how could they have hit us any further when we were already the ones being screwed into the ground by the whole deal. 
But we weren’t being screwed to the ground by the whole deal. Germany suffered the effects of the oil shortage too (although I don’t think they were directly embargoed), along with every other country in the world.
The reason Germany has an advantage in engineering is because it invests in it - in the skills and the machinery - while the British spent the 60s and 70s using clapped-out machinery and labour-intensive methods. For example, instead of investing in modern milling and boring machines for engines, they’d have a fella using a feeler gauge trying to match by hand the tolerances of a variety of pistons and blocks (whose dimensions were all over the place).
It’s no different today. We have the technology for automated warehouses - but the British prefer to hire legions of low-paid workers working long hours to do the work manually. And one day sooner than the British no doubt, Germany will be covered in automated warehouses that out-compete even the low-skill, lowest-paid workers of Britain, because their machines work for free 24 hours a day (once the initial capital investment is sunk), and they’ll have all the skill and experience (and high-pay jobs) in designing and building those machines.
And because they can then move and store physical goods cheaper in Germany (i.e. with less labour required), their products will be cheaper (as well as being higher quality), and they’ll also capture global market share from British bosses who squandered their years, and who took their billions out of the economy as higher immediate profits.
Since the 1980s, British bosses have been dropping their trousers and showing their @rses to the German bosses, bragging about easy profits in Britain, bragging about British “competitiveness”, whilst the Germans were ploughing their money into their own development and economic future. So-called “anglo-saxon capitalism” incenses the Germans and the French, because whilst they’re trying to do things responsibly, making their investments, retaining their profits, paying their taxes, they have us dropping wages and dropping taxes to undercut their economic models in the short-term. The British worker, of course, does not benefit, because the only jobs he gains are those with crap pay and squalid conditions consistent with this model, and it is the good jobs that he loses - but for the British boss, what does he care whether his profits are made from providing good jobs or poor jobs?
It’s why the Tories have got a shock when they thought they were going to leave the EU and force down wages, taxes, and regulations even further, and the French and Germans have made clear that it will be followed up by tariffs on access to their markets, and that they’re not going to give us a single inch of maneouver on the issue of standards if we want tariff-free access to the EU market.
