Royal Navy submarine HMS Victorious departs HMNB Clyde, 2013. Wikicommons/LA(Phot) Will Haigh/MOD. Some rights reserved.
The past four decades have seen the UK manufacturing sector dramatically reduced and restructured. The Conservative government of the 1980s ended the state protection of manufacturing and scattered it to the winds of international markets.
For strategic reasons, the government preserved a military manufacturing base, sustained by Ministry of Defence contracts for weapons to national defence and to fight political wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Successive governments have also subsidised a commercial arms-export industry to the tune of hundreds of millions a year by financing R&D programmes; paying hundreds of civil servants and diplomats to drum up business for private arms manufacturers; and then underwriting the deals in the event of non-payment.
