What Deindustrialisation Took From Us

Craft, class, and the disappearance of practical intelligence

After reading Alex Hobson’s first essay on class, I wanted to add my perspective but as I started writing, it made me think about what my perspective actually is and what formed it, as well as my insecurities about whether my voice is qualified to be heard.

My background and political instincts

I didn’t grow up in a strongly political house. My parents did not really talk much about Thatcher, she was there in the background. My dad remembers things like interest rates being high in the 80s and early 90s but not much else got talked about really. We lived quite secure lives. My parents had a fair bit of precarity when they first got a mortgage, because that was when my dad was made redundant. But then they stabilised.

I often wonder what I am? Am I a crafts person? an intellectual? Am I working class? Am I lower middle class? Does any of that matter?

Also, I don’t describe myself as Marxist, despite being a progressive and despite my opposition to modern capitalism. Marxism seems to presume that industrial manufacturing is a given, which means craft seems to fall through the cracks. But is the continuing displacement of craft via technology, actually good for human wellbeing?

School, intelligence, and not fitting the system

The other day I looked back on my school reports and they show something about who I was to become, if only with the benefit of hindsight. I was described as bright, but if only I would try harder and apply myself. That was the same across most of my subjects, I think most of the time I was a bit bored. I am curious but I tend to want to go deeper than surface level and most of the time that was not required. In the few practical subjects I did, I was praised for my effort. so I think that shows I could put effort when I was engaged.

School was definitely not the right shape for me. I am probably an autodidact, but I’m not the right shape to perform in most academic settings, especially school.

I ended up falling into craftwork mostly due to my early love of cycling and an opportune phone call. At no point in school was this even an option that was talked about. It’s not been a highly paid career but it has been a meaningful one.

I go into more detail about my own background and how education shaped me in this essay, What Happened to Working-Class Intelligence?

Deindustrialisation and the collapse of meaningful work

I think a lot of people are angry because there are very few decent jobs for non academic people anymore, what there is is very low skilled, precarious and low paid with no progression. Then when someone says it’s because we’ve brought too many people into the country, it feels explanatory. But the reality is we’ve not had a national reckoning with the disaster of deindustrialisation, the financialisation of the economy and the way the we’ve made a the UK mostly a poor country attached to a very prosperous London and the south east

Industry needed modernising for sure, but we need industry don’t we? Otherwise, what are people supposed to do for work? Work for Amazon? There is a common misconception that industry was a lot of monotonous factory work, and yes that existed, but there was also a lot of work in light and heavy engineering which was identity forming and had plenty of room for career progression.

Without industry we are left with a Britain which is basically being slowly rundown by capitalists who are just finding every way possible to extract the remaining wealth from the working and middle classes. Wealth that was built up in the post war period.

Last week I had a framebuilding student who started his career as an industrial mechanic apprentice. He hated school but he was one of the last generations that still had an apprenticeship path in front of him and it led to a very fulfilling career. All week he told me stories of camaraderie and pride in a job well done. It was often hard work, sometimes dangerous but definitely not monotonous.

This is what deindustrialisation has robbed from so many young people. industry needed to modernise, but they way it was handled by Thatcher and successive governments has been detrimental to generations of people and the effects are still deep

Apprenticeship, maintenance, and the physical world

The thing is we are not meaningfully producing people who maintain the physical world, so where will we get them from?

Another student on a framebuilding course was the aircraft mechanic. Aircraft need maintenance (as if that needs to be stated). British Airways got rid of their apprentices and workshops in the 80s/90s and decided to rely on the pool of labour that existed in the job market. But that pool of labour was no longer being replaced. Because of scarcity, most now work freelance and they charge the airlines more than a pilots wage!

We are getting to the end of the working lives of these mechanics now. Their work is highly skilled, full of decades worth of formed judgement. Where will the replacements come from? or are we going to stop flying?

I’ve heard stories like this from all over industry, because my work amazingly connects me with the remnants of a nearly extinct workshop culture. Whether its welders or maintenance engineers, the skills are dying out and yet even in our technological world, maintaining things is often where the most skill and judgement is needed,

Reform voters, distrust, and political anger

I know some reform voters. I know them as people, from before reform existed. Many of them are unhappy with many things in the country.

A cyclist I know, who towards the end of his working life mainly did driving jobs, developed a dislike for the government because of the waste he experienced. Whether it was delivering prescriptions to people who are never in or delivering mail to government departments (which used to be handled by royal mail). These kinds of things that people experience in daily life often form a basis for people’s views. It might only be a snapshot but it also points to something real.

This customer bemoans the fact that so many people work for the government. but when you actually interrogate it, it’s not that he’s wrong, it’s just that they work for private companies who have parasitic relationships with the government. Whether it’s delivering prescriptions or internal government mail.

The main effect is a loss of trust in how the country is run. This is easy to exploit by parties like reform who blame it on a bloated welfare state, or immigrants.

Existing between worlds

For a long time I think I occupied an awkward space culturally. Too intellectual for some workshop environments. Too workshop-orientated for many intellectual environments. I increasingly realise this tension is actually productive.

My life has been shaped by standing between those worlds. I understand the dignity and intelligence present within practical work. But I also increasingly feel able to articulate it philosophically. That perhaps explains why so much of my recent writing attempts to bridge craft, class, politics, and moral philosophy.

I do not think ordinary working people are stupid because they didn’t do well at school and work a manual job. I think that the idea of manual work has been collapsed to mean just labour and all the skill and judgement that often goes into this work has been forgotten (or just invisible). A framebuilder that I admire describes himself as “not clever” because he didn’t do well at school. Yet this same man has built thousands of bike frames from scratch without ever really planning them out much in advance.

In all skilled work there is much thinking, but it’s often not conscious. It’s informed by years of pattern recognition, learned judgement and memories of solving problems.

Sometimes this is hard to see in industry because many engineering crafts are very specific and hard to visualise when you’ve not experienced them. Fully contained crafts, like making bicycle frames, give us a way of visualising this. We hold much of what we are making in our heads, we don’t work from a fully specified design. Richards Sachs, another master framebuilder I admire put it like this, “A bike frame starts out as a dream in my head which I resolve into a real object at the bench, in collaboration with all my materials.” That is intelligence!

Why I feel compelled to speak about craft

I often feel as though I don’t belong as a thinker on these subjects, but when I look at the craftspeople I admire, they often never found a voice to talk about it and I feel like I need to get these thoughts out of my head and also defend people who just quietly make beautiful objects that last and transcend our consumerist culture.

There is a danger that in the craft and the wider world it operates in that if we don’t have voices like myself, we don’t get to shape the future. I see this in craft all the time. The future of craft is often talked about mostly by academics and those working in heritage institutions and only rarely by craftspeople. I often come back to John Berger and what he said about trained perception, because if you are not trained to see things, how can you even know what needs defending?

The main question I come to in all of this is, how much human potential are we currently ignoring and not providing an outlet for? And in doing so are we quietly heading for a future where we no longer have enough people in Britain who can maintain the material world?