ABSTRACT
Discussion about the causes and consequences of the ‘decline of Britain’ shows little sign of flagging. Indeed such discussion threatens to become something of a national pastime, perhaps stimulated by the growing recognition that the ‘Thatcher experiment’ did little to arrest this decline. If the evidence of decline is palpable and pervasive and if discussion about the malaise has been long drawn out it is as yet an inconclusive discussion. The most frequently encountered explanation for Britain’s inability to compete with the economies of Japan, the United States and Western Europe is the failure of manufacturers to replace at an adequate rate those tools and techniques that enabled Britain to rise to pre-eminence towards the end of the eighteenth century. In explaining Britain’s poor economic performance others have pointed to what they regard as the persistent ‘bias of British capital’.
