During the 1960s, the British state managed a relatively successful transition of workers from contracting coalfields into emergent assembly-goods sectors—automobiles, commercial vehicles, household appliances. The number of miners in Britain declined from around 700,000 in the late 1950s to fewer than 300,000 in the early 1970s, but this shedding of jobs in one sector was accompanied by the creation of new industrial employment in the same communities. Hoover employed thousands in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, and Cambuslang in Lanarkshire, a coal and steel settlement on the edges of Glasgow. Caterpillar, the tractor and bulldozer manufacturer, operated plants in Birtley in County Durham and at Tannochside in Lanarkshire, a site which repurposed land cleared of derelict miners’ housing. Rootes was obliged to build a large car factory at Linwood outside Paisley, employing former Clydeside shipbuilders, Glasgow locomotive engineers, and Lanarkshire miners.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Labour governments used the state’s capacity to compel capital to locate private investment in regions marked for manufacturing expansion. The British state stewarded investment into emergent industries where disinvestment appeared inevitable, and coordinated the transition between them. This makes these earlier decades stand apart from what followed under Tory rule and New Labour in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Cumulatively, these changes created a more balanced and equitable labor market, including new centers of manufacturing and white-collar work for women in areas where such jobs had previously been scarce.
The North Sea petroleum complex was itself a creation of the planning state of British social democracy. During the 1970s, the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan operated an Offshore Supplies Office (OSO) alongside the nationalized British National Oil Corporation. The OSO applied pressure on oil majors to place orders at British yards—including converted shipyards on the Tyne and the Clyde, and at Burntisland in Fife. In Fife, itself a contracting coalfield, a large oil rig fabrication yard was built at Methil on the former site of Wellesley colliery. This precedent demonstrates that the state capacity to direct private capital and coordinate industrial transition exists within living memory.
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