Britain’s Industrial Base

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I always have great regard for anyone who gets on the train and decides to go round to visit his patch. That is because my great-grandfather and grandfather were chairmen of railway companies and used to race each other to Scotland so that they could get into the siding for breakfast. Therefore, railways and transport have always appealed to me. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, referred me to the Aldington report. I have already mentioned in the House that that was rather frightening to be involved in because we asked, “What happens when oil runs out? What will the British economy be based on?”.

I do not want to waste your Lordships’ time, but being a member of the Information Committee, I have a duty to promote the Library. The Library has produced a most excellent briefing pack, which many of your Lordships will not have seen because the Library is not very good at marketing it. It covers most of the points that need to be raised. The first question we asked—because I am always among my intellectual superiors when I go into the Library—is: what do we mean by Britain’s industrial base? The CBI could not tell me. Nobody could tell me. Were we talking of a manufacturing base? Was industry manufacturing? What about the service industries? I therefore wondered what the term applied to.

I looked again and thought that if we are to develop, we must accept what our economy is based on at the moment, and a large chunk of it must be based on foreign trade. However, we have relatively small exports by manufacturers. We have a large export of services and we have a tremendous financial business that often follows—as people have said, the star.

I always remember from my days when I had to do Latin:

“Abstract nouns in ‘io’ call Feminina one and all. Masculin can only be things that you can touch or see”.

I like things and I do not like the internet—I do not like all these communications where you have no physical manifestation. I do not like picking up the phone and asking a question to be replied to by somebody in a call station in the Philippines. I wonder whether we are not moving too far away from the physical, on which our economy should be based.

Let us take transport. That is one area where we are good, and we are good at railways. I was very moved when I saw that great steam locomotive during the Queen’s Jubilee. I thought that perhaps we have not run out of the ability to do trains. One project I got involved in was the Chemin de Fer Transgabonais. When President Bongo came to London, what clinched it was our suggestion that he might like to have a locomotive named after him: “Le President Bongo”. He said yes, provided that he could have another one based on the iron maiden, La Vièrge de Fer, meaning my noble friend Lady Thatcher. That triggered our building a railway.

My noble friend on the Front Bench will know that the same thing happened in water and sewerage, which were areas where we had great expertise in tunnelling over the years. Often you would have to almost dig out of his grave the engineer who had done it. I would talk to people aged 80 or more who had been involved with the Crown Agents or one of the other development bodies that we had around the world.

If we are relying on foreign trade for a large part of our future economic growth, we should look at the energy sector worldwide and the maritime sector—the water and the sea. I have already mentioned in your Lordships’ House that, with the Commonwealth, we have the longest coastline in the world. The coastline of the United Kingdom is longer than the coastline of India. That leads to shellfish because of the ins and outs. If we then look at the dependent territories and others, and the economic exclusion zones that apply around the islands, we see that we cover the largest part of the sea under what you might call the British flag.

In looking at our future, I suggest that we must take certain sectors and realise that we must not look only at this market; we have to look worldwide. Here comes the intellectual property of the engineering brigade made up of those who were educated and trained here and who trained others. An engineer from India trained here will go back to India, recall all that and have a certain loyalty. More can be done by training our young people and people worldwide, sending them back and keeping the relationship going.

We look, too, at the energy sector, which I find fascinating, and which the noble Lord raised. There is not just the movement of tidal floods, there is also the application of heat. We should look at where around the world there are energy requirements and energy resources—not just fossil fuels.

It is beyond my pay grade to work out how this happens, but people have said to me, “Look at the heat generated in the deserts. Look at heat transfer. Look at the pumping system. Look also at desalination”. One thought that came to mind during the Gulf War was that if you wanted to bring a country to its knees, all you would have to do would be to let oil out into the Gulf and block up every desalination plant.

In an odd way, infrastructure around the world is one of our futures. We cannot afford to rebuild our own infrastructure without having large orders. I am enthusiastic about the future, but it must be technologically led.