Nicholas Comfort, author of Surrender: How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost, 1952-2012, believes that the Prime Minister will have to take a gentle approach on his trade mission to Asia, if he's to eradicate damage done in the past...
“Load(ing) up an aeroplane with business people” to “get our exports up”, as David Cameron is doing this week, starting in Japan, isn't anything new – Prime Ministers and trade ministers have been doing it for half a century. But the nature of the animal has changed as Britain has gone from the world's leading exporter to a supplier of niche products and services, and as investment by the countries visited has become as important to our economic future as what we have to sell.
Back in the 1960s and '70s we had plenty to sell, but also apologies to make. It was tough trying to sell British goods when strikes and/or poor quality made foreign purchasers reluctant to buy them. And it was just as embarrassing for Sir Geoffrey Howe, unveiling a new Rover in Japan, to find he had been sent a left hand-drive model, as it was for a Parliamentary mission to Taiwan to find a textile mill with half its output labelled ‘Made in Huddersfield.’
Nowadays we are better at what we do, even if we do much less of it and key sectors of British industry are at the mercy of decisions taken in boardrooms around the world on whether to continue to invest. Cameron's Japanese mission has been boosted by carefully-timed announcements of Nissan producing a new hatchback in Sunderland, of Panasonic setting up a fuel research centre in Cardiff and of Mitsubishi basing a wind turbine project in Edinburgh.
British investment in Japan's essentially closed market has never been much of an option. But last year's tsunami and the near-disaster at Fukushima which torpedoed Japan's nuclear power programme has given our nuclear industry, apparently forgiven for a data-rigging episode at Sellafield some 12 years ago, an opportunity to help decommission Japan's nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the vulnerability of the Japanese semiconductor and automotive industries displayed by the tsunami, and indeed of other highish-tech industries halted by the floods in Bangkok, have increased the UK's appeal to Far Eastern manufacturers as a resilient alternative source of production and supply.
Much of Cameron's emphasis is on co-operation between defence industries, and of the scope for manufacturers like Westland to break into a market once dominated by America. He has taken with him a strong contingent from BAE Systems, and here there is damage to undo. Ministers have seen the Eurofighter Typhoon as spearheading Britain's defence export drive, but Japan opted for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (in which Britain has a smaller stake). At a critical moment Defence Secretary Philip Hammond was advised that a softly-softly approach would work best with the Japanese, only for BAE to persuade him to go in with all guns blazing. As Hammond had been warned, the tactic backfired. Cameron still has high hopes that BAE can win business in Japan, but this week the approach is likely to be more subtle.