Andy Burnham wants to “reindustrialise Britain”. Bold, ambitious words, but what do they mean in practice? Responding to Ben Glover’s opening essay, “Burnham’s Politics of Production”, Future of the Left will be publishing a series of replies as part of a debate on the new politics of production, including Dani Rodrik on the service economy; Paul Mason on defence; Jessica Prendergrast on place; Dan Mead on good jobs and cities; Karel Williams and David Edgerton on SMEs; Max Hebertson on innovation; David Lawrence on supply-side reform.
Written by Frederick Harry Pitts, Associate Professor of Political Economy & the Future of Work at the University of Exeter in Cornwall.
With the social-democratic comfort zone of distributional politics disrupted in an increasingly zero-sum context, Ben Glover rightly argues for this renewed government to focus instead on the politics of production. Here I set out six points on the relationship between rearming as a strategic imperative, reindustrialising as a necessary step, and ‘reinfrastructuring’ as an enabling condition; and on the reframing of our islands, edgelands and heartlands in this emergent new political economy. In short, Burnham has a historic chance to identify a new labour interest whose bargaining power derives from the skilled work that makes and remakes our material security on a daily basis.
In a more dangerous world, reindustrialisation is not an end in itself but part and parcel of rearmament for whole-of-society defence, security and resilience. The desire to return to the socio-economic settlement decimated by deindustrialisation is an understandable response to pervasive and tangible decline, but the stakes are too high to reindustrialise for its own sake. The government must avoid an agnostic anything-goes attitude and set out precisely what will advance the needs of a new national interest. In short, restoring Britain’s industrial base must balance ‘growth’ against sovereign capability in the sectors that matter most to military and material advantage.
In a more material world, reindustrialisation cannot reduce to manufacturing but must encompass foundational industries that produce, extract and process metals and minerals. Power in the political economy of contemporary capitalism centres on the creation, control and ownership of physical assets and resources. The category of ‘foundational industries’ set out in the modern industrial strategy must be strengthened as an equal counterpart to the so-called ‘growth-driving’ sectors, with a broad range of activities supported up and down the value chain. Mines, refineries and processing plants will be as much a feature of Britain’s future industrial skyline as factories.
In a more connected world, reindustrialisation requires ‘reinfrastructuring’ Britain, not just via transport and housing, but in sectors of critical national infrastructure like space, energy and telecoms. Conflict and competition today centre on the capacity to control and compromise the same circuits and flows of information and material resources that connect and protect us. Sovereign and secure critical national infrastructure is sustained by industries and skilled jobs intrinsically rooted in particular places; in this sense reindustrialisation will rest not only on the work of making and producing, but also on maintaining and monitoring, powering and protecting.
In an age of crisis and conflict, reindustrialisation reminds us of strategic advantages associated with the geography and geology of our archipelagic island nations. Recent electoral cleavages between voters bound to concrete places, and those found in abstract spaces, precipitated the legitimacy crisis of a service-based ‘anywhere’ economy that left large parts of the country behind. In the wake of geopolitical fractures that saw flows of goods and products disrupted and contested, a ‘somewhere’ economy emerged, rooted in material resources and infrastructures. The deep history of the physical development of these islands bestows latent strengths realised in peripheralised places.
Reindustrialisation reframes the contribution of the coastal, rural and small-town edgelands where critical resources, industries and infrastructures are concentrated. The geographical advantages and natural resources crucial to the reinfrastructuring of Britain – hot rocks, deep waters, windy coasts and clear skies – as well as the historical foundations for our industrial capacity, tend to be located away from urban centres in precisely those parts of the country most disconnected from a dying political economy. Minerals, ports, windfarms and satellites cannot be anywhere but where they are, and the jobs and industries they support will be place-based by default rather than design.
Rather than a past of redistribution defined in terms of growth, reindustrialisation revalorises these new heartlands around a future of contribution defined in terms of security. By stressing the sheer force of geography, global fractures reinforce the need to work with the industrial and infrastructural genotypes of localities. A project of national renewal in pursuit of resilience against prevailing risks depends on places playing a part via their unique combinations of industrial and infrastructural capacity. No longer playing second fiddle to the metropolitan centres of the service economy, the new political economy of production can build the power of these places and their workers.
Importantly, this rests on the articulation of a new labour interest whose leverage attaches to the crucial work of making and producing, monitoring and maintaining, and powering and protecting critical assets, resources and processes. Just as capital must be bent to the needs of sovereignty and security, embedding such a labour interest in the institutions of a new political economy relies on its representatives being active partners with the state in the struggle against our geopolitical adversaries. The reindustrialising and reinfrastructuring of Britain will create new vulnerabilities and a bigger target area to disrupt, and these workers will be essential to keeping the lights on.
