Britain has a long history of industrial failure. The roll call is familiar, even wearisome. British Leyland in the 1970s became a punchline, a Frankenstein’s monster of brands and plants producing cars so unreliable they became the butt of jokes across Europe. Endless strikes, managerial incompetence and ministerial bailouts turned the company into a cautionary tale of how not to run an industry.
British Steel was no less bruising. Once the backbone of the nation’s industrial might, it became a casualty of the 1980s drive for efficiency. Thousands of jobs were lost as plants closed, communities hollowed out, and the steel towns of the North and Midlands were left to rust. The story has not ended. Today the remnants of British Steel are in the hands of a Chinese conglomerate, Jingye, which repeatedly threatened closure of blast furnaces at Scunthorpe and Teesside until the Government was forced to take control.
And yet against this bleak inheritance, something remarkable has happened. In shipbuilding, Britain has bucked the national habit of drift and decay, replacing bailouts and closures with a coherent strategy that works. The 2017 National Shipbuilding Strategy has turned the Clyde and Rosyth from symbols of industrial retreat into centres of renewal. Instead of being written off, the yards are exporting warships on a scale unmatched anywhere in the world. After half a century of epitaphs, Britain has rediscovered how to build — and in doing so has re-established itself as the world’s pre-eminent naval exporter.
The common thread between shipbuilding and space is not coincidence but consistency
In Glasgow, BAE has built the Janet Harvey Hall, a vast construction hall at Govan large enough to assemble two warships side by side. Shipbuilding jobs in Scotland have risen from about 6,000 to more than 7,200 over the past decade. Rosyth hums with the Type 31 frigate programme, Glasgow leads on digital design and advanced welding, and a new generation of apprentices is being trained.
The Royal Navy is building more ships, but exports are the real revelation. The Type 31 has already been sold to Indonesia and Poland, with new orders expected from Denmark and Sweden. More spectacular still, the Type 26 frigates have become the crown jewel of global naval exports. Orders from Australia, Canada and Norway now account for between £66 and £74 billion — making the programme larger in value than all other surface vessel export programmes in the world combined. Add Britain’s role in the AUKUS submarine pact, expected to generate up to £20 billion in exports over the next 25 years, and the picture is striking: after decades of decline, Britain is now a naval export powerhouse for the first time in decades.
It is here that the contrast with Scotland’s ferry fiasco could not be starker. In 2015, Ferguson Marine was awarded contracts to build two CalMac ferries at a cost of £97 million, with delivery dates of 2018 and 2019. The result has been a national embarrassment. The vessels remain unfinished, costs have soared beyond £400 million, and design flaws were so glaring that “painted-on” windows became a national punchline. Audit Scotland later concluded that the contracts were riddled with failings, financial safeguards were bypassed, and political expediency trumped competence. For the island communities relying on CalMac services, the fiasco has been more than embarrassing: it has meant cancelled sailings, unreliable service, and economic damage.
The lesson is simple. The National Shipbuilding Strategy succeeded because it was based on consistency, credible pipelines, and international demand. The ferry project failed because it was built on political grandstanding, procurement slackness and managerial weakness. One instilled confidence and attracted investment; the other destroyed both.
Shipbuilding is not the only national success to celebrate. Britain’s space sector offers another case where the country has quietly carved out global leadership. At first glance, this might sound fanciful: Britain has no launch tradition to speak of, no Kennedy Space Center, no Soyuz, no Saturn V. But over the last two decades, the UK has become a notable player in space.
By 2024, the UK space sector employed nearly 50,000 people, generated around £17.5 billion annually, and had built an ecosystem stretching from Harwell’s “Space Cluster” in Oxfordshire to Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall and proposed launch sites in the Shetlands and Sutherland.
Here, too, the role of strategy is clear. The creation of the UK Space Agency in 2010 gave coherence to what had been a patchwork of projects. Targeted co-investment — backing ventures like OneWeb, earth observation systems, and the Satellite Applications Catapult — anchored a sector that might otherwise have drifted offshore. The national space strategy, updated in 2021, provided something British industry often lacks: direction.
And the results are tangible. By 2018 the UK’s global share of building small satellites (used for everything from communications to weather monitoring) had grown to 40 per cent. Despite Brexit, Britain remains the home of the European Space Agency’s telecoms and navigation directorates. The Harwell cluster in Oxfordshire now hosts more than 100 companies, from start-ups to giants like Airbus Defence and Space. Spaceports in Scotland and Cornwall are bringing launch capability closer. And while Britain no longer dreams of manned missions, it has staked out a strong position in the real growth areas: satellites, services, and data.
This is not nostalgia. It is a reminder that with long-term planning, partnership between government and industry, and a willingness to stick to strategy, Britain can still create whole new industries.
The common thread between shipbuilding and space is not coincidence but consistency. Both sectors have benefited from steady pipelines, international partnerships, and the confidence to invest. Both have been rooted in exports as well as domestic need. Both have turned Britain from punchline to player.
Contrast that again with British Leyland, British Steel, or the Scottish ferries: stories of drift, mismanagement, and squandered chances. For decades, Britain seemed to believe that decline was a law of nature. But decline is not inevitable. Where there is strategy, there can be resilience. And in a world where resilience is itself a measure of power, that matters
The cranes of the Clyde and the satellites of Harwell are telling the same story. Britain, for once, is beginning to get its industrial strategy right.
