Britain at Breaking Point

Reindustrialise, Recapitalise and |Rebalance or Perish

For decades, Britain has been in economic freefall camouflaged by glossy GDP figures and metropolitan propaganda. The truth? We are not in control of our destiny. We’ve sold off the family silver, gutted our industries, and turned our backs on working-class talent. Both the NeoCons and the Liberals are guilty, architects of a political consensus that worships the City of London while bleeding the rest of the country dry.

While Germany kept its Mittelstand and regional industry alive, we outsourced ours to the lowest bidder. While China invested in its productive base, we cheered on financialisation and outsourced core infrastructure decisions to hedge funds, foreign firms, or just spreadsheets. We have become a country addicted to service sector illusions and spreadsheet economics. And all the while, data and statistics have been weaponised to sell this delusion to the public.

Take employment stats: constantly touted as signs of a healthy economy, yet a deeper dive reveals a workforce increasingly trapped in precarious jobs, gig work, zero-hours contracts, and deprofessionalised sectors. Productivity? Flatlined. Real wages? Stagnant for nearly two decades. But politicians pat themselves on the back for "low unemployment" while ignoring underemployment and chronic economic insecurity.

Trade data is another mirage. Export numbers are manipulated by the inflated figures of financial services and arms sales, masking the collapse of real, productive trade. Manufacturing as a share of GDP has shrunk from over 25% in the 1970s to barely 9% today. Are the policies responsible for this? A combination of brutal deindustrialisation, privatisation, and a blind belief in globalisation as a panacea.

The so-called Industrial Strategy papers churned out every few years by Whitehall read like bland MBA assignments, full of buzzwords, graphs, and KPIs, yet lacking any real substance or commitment. They are strategy theatre, white elephants on glossed paper. There is no vision to bring back steel, shipbuilding, rail engineering, precision manufacturing, or to decentralise R&D away from London and Oxbridge.

And yet, in every working-class community, there is latent talent. Engineers, mechanics, designers, and problem solvers. The kind of people who built Britain and could build it again. But their skills go ignored, underfunded, or worse — exported. We train them, then lose them to Germany, Canada, or the Gulf. Why? Because our political class doesn’t value them. It values speculation, not skill. Asset flipping, not engineering. Consultancy, not craftsmanship.

To reindustrialise is not nostalgia, it is survival. It means state-led investment in national supply chains, not reliance on China. It means funding apprenticeships, technical colleges, and innovation hubs in Yorkshire and the North East, not just another start-up incubator in Shoreditch. It means stopping the haemorrhage of talent and beginning the process of economic self-respect.

Reindustrialisation also means recapitalising the working economy — investing in the tools, machines, and infrastructure that actually build things, not just shuffle derivatives. The British Business Bank should be recapitalised tenfold. A National Infrastructure and Industry Bank should be established with a single purpose: to support British industry.

Above all, this is about political will. The current parties are ideologically incapable of delivering it. For them, war is the only form of reindustrialisation they will contemplate — shipyards for submarines, factories for munitions. The working class gets conscription (soon enough) or defence jobs, while the core economy is hollowed out. We need an industrial policy for peace, for transport, housing, energy resilience, and the basics.

The future is not a global Britain. The future is a grounded Britain. We reindustrialise, or we perish.