A few days ago, a friend loaned me a book: Whatever happened to the British motorcycle industry, by Bert Hopwood published in 1982. He was an engineer who worked in the business all his life, rising to the very top as it went from world beater to basket case during the post war years. He recounts endless catastrophic decisions made by senior managers and directors who never seemed to understand the market or the customers.
In the later stages of decline, in all of the major marques, either the chairman, the shareholders or the government regularly brought in new management from outside or employed consultants who understood the industry less and less. There seemed to be a deliberate plan to employ men at the top who knew the very least. This is not uncommon in Britain. I have personal experience of it, albeit in another industry.
It is not as if these people were badly
advised. Often they had ready made solutions and strategies laid out in
front of them but through ignorance and sheer pig headedness they chose
disaster and decline.
New
products were hurriedly designed and put into production to compete with the perceived threat
from the Japanese but without any coherent strategy. Through lack of testing, they were either
unreliable, at the wrong price or too late to the market and sometimes
all three.
These situations always seemed to occur where time was short, the objective either ill defined, totally unrealisable or even non-existent. Resources were never adequate and nobody in the line of command seemed to understand what they were supposed to be doing.
The person at the very top usually had an enormous ego and blind optimism that everything would be be fine, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. All this went on for twenty years or more. It's not as if they didn't have the chances to save the industry or foreign success stories to learn from.
One might say this explains Britain's unique answer to problem solving. The more intractable the issue is, the less direct knowledge you bring to the problem the better, as if experience is an automatic disqualification.
I recount it because I have also just read the British-Irish Chamber of Commerce (BICC) response to the interim report of the Alternative Arrangements Commission (AAC) on the Irish border issue. Considering the firepower put into the report by the great and the good of Brexit and other 'experts' the response was withering if not altogether surprising. I won't go into detail because you can read it yourself, but the BICC said the proposals, "lack credibility in the reality of
how all-island trade actually works". In private I assume the response was a bit less measured.
It is precisely the same uniquely British approach to problem solving as we saw in the motor cycle industry. Just gather a group of people who think they are extremely clever although they actually know very little about the issue at hand. I'm thinking here of Nicky Morgan, Greg Hands, Shanker Singham, etc. In modern Britain it is only necessary to have a degree in History or PPE, speak in a ruling class way and think
yourself well above ordinary mortals to get a hand on the steering wheel.
In fact, all they share is a blind optimism and the idea that the real experts who have spent months and years working on the backstop solution have got it all wrong because they didn't 'believe' in it strongly enough.
The BICC, full of people who actually knew what they were talking about, must have been utterly bemused to hear the presentation and be told of these 'solutions' that misunderstood the issue and hadn't even been properly thought through. Were the Commission embarrassed? Of course not, the full report will be out next month.
This stuff has been going on for a century at least and probably much longer. Failure after failure teaches us nothing. Entire industries go down the tubes but we still think a group of highly educated know-nothings is the answer to every problem.
The British motorcycle industry couldn't survive and neither will the so-called Alternative Arrangements.
All of which brings me to Boris Johnson. We are told his team are preparing (HERE) for a busy summer as they prepare to wrestle with a problem so complex it has defeated the brightest and the best for three years. Boris' gang, including people like Gavin Williamson and Nigel Adams, hardly the sharpest knives in the drawer, prepare for a long summer working on a problem which they don't even understand.
Meanwhile, the top civil servants at DEXEU, the men and women who actually do understand the problems, are leaving in droves (HERE) much to the consternation of business.
Once again we see the British solution. We have tried the most incisive minds in Whitehall now let's give ignorance a bash. Will it work? No. Don't hold your breath.
