Close on the heels of Channel 4’s ridiculous Make Bradford British “documentary” came yet another series seeming to highlight the plight of us poor Northerners and running for three weeks in March. Mary’s Bottom Line was fronted by the ubiquitous Mary Portas, self-styled High Street Guru and described as “London’s leading retail marketing consultant” albeit through her own website; recently she became advisor to the Government on the problems facing the UK’s High Streets. The Government have just accepted most of her recommendations and backed her with £1m of cash for a pilot programme.
The three part series sought to begin a revival of British textile manufacturing using Channel 4’s tried and tested formula: a celebrity name, a big issue and the unsuspecting public. Without wishing to appear cynical it was hard to wonder whether it was more about Mary than the issue she claimed to be addressing; certainly the mandatory waterfall of tears – crocodile or not – midway through the first episode might make one wonder and there was lots of posturing and posing. Successful she may be in her own field it does beg the question of how much the likes of Portas really know of the Average Joe’s everyday life.
Those Mean Streets
Take one quote from Ms Portas in a recent Daily Telegraph interview, where she says “I’ve been to major cities, but I hadn’t been outside. To see the boys standing on streets with their broken mobile phones”. She sounds like some tourist on a safari rather than a short hop outside of one of the UK’s largest and most vibrant cities, in this case Manchester. If, like me, you thought people like Portas lived in a bubble then maybe that’s the proof you needed.
The show or perhaps experiment – the jury is still out as the funding from Channel 4 lasts for nine months – was based at the Headen & Quarmby textiles factory in Middleton, half an hour from central Manchester. Typical of so many textile businesses, either side of the Pennines, this remains family run but ceased to manufacture in the UK some eight years ago when it began out-sourcing production to the Far East. Design work is still done in house but the end product is now imported as is, according to the programme, around 90% of all we wear from the High Street.
The Collapse of an Empire
Having worked closely with the textile industry in West Yorkshire for the asset finance arm of Barclays in the defining period of the 1990s, I saw first hand many of the battles the industry fought, and ultimately lost. Portas talked of the culture of “greed” that led so many retailers to turn their backs on domestically produced goods and head east; textiles was one of the first to be picked off by the offer of cheap, unregulated labour in plentiful supply.
The nadir for the local industry in particular was when M&S announced in the early 1990s that it was ceasing its massive commitment to UK manufacturing and thus creating howls of protest from the industry, a lot of which was mistakenly directed solely at M&S. This was unfair; M&S had effectively become the last man standing in the volume High Street arena. New entrants into the market such as Next never had as much commitment to the UK manufacturers as M&S had demonstrated; we all went east as a result.
My City of Ruins
Prior to this, UK manufacturers had been playing a game of catch up. In large part they invested heavily in state of the art equipment to try and achieve the efficiencies of production that might compensate for an unseen competition employing its workforce on a bowl of rice a day. In those days Bradford alone had three quoted companies all supplying woollen and worsted products to the High Street. These were: Parkland Group, Drummond Group and S Jerome & Son and they had a combined turnover then of circa £150m so they were significant players. All three spent millions which, sadly, was to no avail.
There were other factors that conspired against the UK textile industry. Both the Conservative and New Labour governments seemed uninterested in manufacturing; they believed that the Square Mile was now the engine of the UK. In addition, the strength of sterling for a significant period made UK exports more expensive and, correspondingly, imports cheaper; this meant that even at the high end of manufacturing the coveted “Made in Britain” tag struggled to compete in key markets like Asia and Japan.
The Bigger – Unseen – Picture
However, as tragic as it became it was not just about textile jobs; the industry created employment for engineering businesses, for haulage companies and for a myriad of other employers. Skills that had been developed over centuries were blown away, deemed too primitive in the brave new hi-tech world. So we closed our eyes to whatever working conditions were suffered in the Asian sweatshops so we could launch our retail boom and go on a mad shopping spree, fuelled by debt; we swapped quality for mass produced rubbish.
Surely it was evidence of an advanced nation that magnificent old mills were now being converted to luxury apartments with no more need for those grimy old jobs? Well the apartments turned out not so magnificent, far too expensive and created very few long term jobs; we blew our heritage all to save a few quid off a suit.
Fact and Fiction
It was hard not to watch this sort of television and feel that the media luvvies are being a touch condescending and to suggest that this offers hope for a resurrection of textile manufacturing is facile at best simply by plugging in a few sewing machines. The scale of investment required to resurrect large scale manufacturing would be immense and where would the funding come from? And given that over the last several decades Portas has spent this working with the very top names in retail is it not a bit late to be crying foul?
In fairness though she proved at a very micro level what can be done if we can convince both the retailer and shopper to adopt the same ethical approach to shopping for clothes as recent campaigns have done for poultry and fish, to name but two. Paying a bit extra to retain some national skills and pride is not a lot to ask. As for the retailers, I do not mean to pick on M&S but this small factory needs 100,000 pairs of knickers to be viable and sustain meaningful jobs; out of the sixty-one million sold annually by M&S that is, indeed, chicken feed. If we can be socially responsible to our chickens and tuna then it’s surely not a massive leap to treat people the same?
Johnnie says
Hello Steve
Interesting post. I missed all but one of the three programs but I’m now watching the follow-up. I wonder if u know anything about the company structure of Kinky Knickers?
Steve says
Thanks…just watched follow up and whilst at first sceptical about yet another weeping celebrity she definitely does have the passion, knowledge and – perhaps most importantly – the contacts to make this happen longer term. Of course we have to wait and see but the pathetic, almost apathetic meeting with the Minister really told its won story.