Prestige Projects: The Road to National Revival? | Jacob Atkinson

On 1 November 1977 Concorde was photographed flying over the Royal Yacht Britannia as the late Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee. The photograph captures two iconic symbols of British soft power and national prestige at a time when the country was widely perceived to be in terminal decline. This perception has continued to the present day and was a major influence on the Brexit vote in 2016. Heritage and its relationship to national identity has similarly been coupled by Robert Hewison and Patrick Wright with the idea of national decline and a nostalgic disdain for the present. Heritage, however, is less an escape from change than a driver of it. Only by considering heritage in this way can we begin to articulate what a national revival could look like.

Although recent undertakings such as the High Speed 2 rail network and plans for a new royal yacht have been mired in political controversy, prestige projects at their best represent the nation at home and abroad. As the national ‘flag carrier’, British Airways operated Concorde on transatlantic flights. At home Concorde symbolised a rejuvenated British technical genius and attracted support from across the political spectrum. She took her maiden flight in 1969 and was retired from service in 2003. Britannia was laid down at John Brown and Company in 1952. launched in 1953, she served as a major soft power asset, greatly strengthening trade and diplomatic links with the Commonwealth and other countries around the world until her decommissioning in 1997. Together they evoke the spirit of an earlier age, driven by the anxiety of national decline as much as the optimism of national pride.

Our generation faces a similar challenge. The anxiety of national decline is once again palpable and the deep desire for change which gave rise to Brexit remains unfulfilled. The ideological project best suited to the task ahead is one which is nationalist in orientation as it seeks to preserve and maintain British national identity and heritage against unrestrained modernity; populist in its appeal because it understands that the British people desire a fundamental change to the economic and social status quo; conservative in its disposition because tradition requires robust defences; and revivalist in its belief that the future can only be built by viewing heritage as a driver of change, not an escape from it. Although Concorde and Britannia were decommissioned at the turn of the millennium their potential as symbols of national revival in a positive sense, not of nostalgia but where the past is viewed as a living source of inspiration, is significant. British economic policy and production must, therefore, be redirected towards reviving our national prestige if the nation is to have confidence in its future. Creating a future that recaptures the spirit of prestige and dynamism which they continue to represent must be understood not only as an ideological project, but a material one. Command of substantial economic resources is required.

Decades of short-sighted economic and social policy have combined to reveal the inherent structural weaknesses that must be urgently addressed if Britain is to be regarded as a serious country once again and to remain at the rank of a first-world economy. Contrary to the messianic visions of economic liberals, offshoring the majority of manufacturing jobs and relying on mass immigration to plug the resulting skills gaps does not produce a long-term increase in national wealth. Annual GDP figures include consumption of imports as ‘production’, effectively making them useless. A new methodology of economic strength is needed. This should be based on the production of strategic mineral resources such as coal, gas, oil, steel and timber. Using this methodology we see Britain languishing at the bottom of the pack in every metric. The post-war British economy through to 1979 was based on a model of ‘national capitalism’ in which manufacturing and innovation was viewed as a national enterprise and encouraged by government. The popular narratives of the 1970s as a decade marred by debilitating economic and political strife, which are marshalled to shore up our moribund economic model, owe more to myth than reality. Growth rates during the 1970s averaged 3.38% per year against 3% per year in the 1980s. By contrast, it has been the policy of successive governments for the last 45 years, driven by rapid deindustrialisation and the rise of a deregulated services sector dominated by finance, to relinquish engineering and manufacturing to foreign direct investment. As a result, Britain today is notable only as a clearing house for international finance and consumer goods, constrained by a globalist political elite and a failed neoliberal economic model which staggers on with nothing to replace it.

Earlier generations of conservatives understood that free-market capitalism and unrestrained individualism are antithetical to conservatism. In a speech to the 1947 Conservative Party conference, Anthony Eden declared: “We are not a Party of unbridled, brutal capitalism, and never have been. Although we believe in personal responsibility and personal initiative in business, we are not the political children of the ‘laissez-faire’ school. We opposed them decade after decade.” In other words, the conservative is a collectivist because he is conserving his class, his people and his nation, while the leftist is an individualist who advocates for collectivist economics in an attempt to create a deracinated individual disconnected from his national heritage. A process of political realignment beginning in the 1970s precipitated the rise of new political cleavages around left-leaning intellectual elites and right-leaning high-income elites, inaugurating a period of political consensus from which the left emerged as “the foot soldiers of neoliberalism”.

The years since the 2008 financial crisis have offered an opportunity to radically change course. Brexit was merely the first step in doing so. As global supply chains contract, countries such as Japan have begun to offer subsidies for companies to relocate production back home. In the short to medium term, Britain should offer a similarly generous relocation package. Alongside this we should also abrogate the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union and pursue a new trading relationship based on World Trade Organisation rules. This would represent a significant structural change to the British economy, but one that would rebalance the economy away from services.

In the long term, research and development funding should increase in parallel with structural changes to the economy. Nationalised industries and state investment allowed for increased research and development spending, which peaked at 3% of GDP in the 1960s compared to around 1.7% of GDP today. The private sector has consistently underinvested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), with the average training time per worker declining by half between 1997 and 2012, despite government encouragement. To achieve the 3% target today requires a radical change in our approach to higher education and corporate responsibility. Little thought has been given by policymakers to promoting aspiration and mobility for those who remain rooted and firmly communitarian. This was reflected by findings in the 2015 British Social Attitudes survey that 32% of British workers did not feel their job is “useful to society”. Brexit has given us an opportunity to increase the pay and status of those in the bottom end of the labour market by reducing our dependence on the training systems of other countries. Modest headline improvements in educational standards obscure the depth of the damage which has resulted from the collapse of the technical skills base. A more diffuse post-18 education system is needed. Most universities are largely self-contained bureaucracies responding to financial and administrative incentives created by the government, not market forces. Because of this, they cannot keep up with all the changes taking place in fast-developing industries. Therefore, the Higher Education Act 1992 should be repealed. Apprenticeships, polytechnics and further education colleges are critical to a rehabilitation of skills-based employer-funded training. These must be expanded at scale and at speed, with an emphasis on high-level technical courses and links to employers which invest in their workers and the communities they live in. 

This would allow more high-level engineering graduates to bring their skills to prestige projects. For example, the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust is a charity committed to reviving defunct steam locomotives by modifying the original designs using advanced computer aided design tools to address inefficiencies and equip the locomotives for operating on today’s railways. The Trust’s work allows the public to experience the past as a living source of inspiration. A revived Concorde would take advantage of these practices and advances in aircraft manufacturing. Concorde’s original turbojet Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engines, though sustainable for their time, could also integrate more recent lessons learned in sustainability from the Symphony™ engine designed by Boom Supersonic for its ‘Overture’ supersonic airliner, which it claims can run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel. United Airlines has ordered 15 of the jets from Boom, with commercial flights expected by 2029. Reviving Concorde by adopting these techniques would show that heritage is a source for a positive national revival and is a driver of change not an escape from it.