Concorde: A Retrospect

On this date in 2003 the last flight by a British Airways Concorde carrying paying passengers flew in to Heathrow. Hundreds of Thousands of people made sure that they could see - and hear - this spectacular aircraft for a last time. There were a few more final flourishes, including one in which half a dozen of the 'planes flew up the Thames estuary towards the airport; then that unique sound vanished from the skies. A few of the aircraft have been kept as museum pieces, but they are naturally regarded as relics rather than as harbingers of great things to come.

The aircraft were first mooted in the nineteen fifties, and a joint venture was sealed with France; long before Britain was admitted to the Common Market that was to mutate into the European Union. Harold Wilson's Labour government strongly considered aborting the project, on cost grounds; but it was decided that this joint exercise with France, that would put Europe ahead of the USA and the USSR, was too important to abandon. Tony Benn, in a short episode of ministerial office, returned from conversations in Paris to report that the project would definitely go ahead: and that the name of the craft would be spelt in the French way - with an e on the end - to stand for Europe, enterprise and a whole string of other e-words that I cannot remember [and it is not worth looking them up].

To fly in Concorde was a very special experience. It was all-first-class [except on specially booked flights] and the space in the cabin was extremely limited. There were four carefully-designed small seats in each row, with a relatively narrow aisle and a low ceiling. Takeoff was spectacular and the craft quickly got to supersonic speed, which was shown on an indicator at the front of the cabin. The westbound journey to New York took almost four hours: which meant that the 'plane arrived in America a little earlier [on the clock] than its takeoff time from London. I was intrigued to find that a lot of people booked westbound flights on Concorde to enjoy the experience of 'beating time'; then they traveled eastbound on less cramped aircraft.

Some people became inter-continental commuters - a few, mostly media figures, on a weekly basis - and claimed to feel no ill-effects from the experience.

The venture was demonstrated soon to be uneconomic. It became a flag-flying exercise for British Airways, Air France and their sponsoring governments. There were no orders from alien airlines, and while the USA and USSR developed and even tested supersonic passenger jets there was no marketed competitor to Concorde.

The context in which this happened was that of the cold war. With the development of nuclear weapons, the competing powers of NATO and the Warsaw Pact needed aircraft that could deliver such weapons with minimum chance of being intercepted before they got over their target. The development of fast fighter 'planes reduced the chances of even supersonic bombers being successful; so began the concentration on inter-continental ballistic missiles. The British and French governments decided jointly to try to create a market for supersonic aircraft in commercial use: and Concorde was the spectacular result. But it was never cost effective. The amount of the most highly-refined fuel needed to get it [and keep it] airborne, in ratio to the number of passengers who could be carried, was never going to be economically efficient. Commercial aircraft constructors saw the future in large-bodied, relatively economical sub-sonic 'planes: of which the Boeing 747 and the European Airbus became the best-known workhorses.

Some of the technology that was developed for supersonic flights was of use generally in the aircraft industry: but that knowledge was mostly acquired from the bomber programmes; Concorde was not needed from that point of view.

As the small stock of planes aged, so maintenance costs increased, fuel efficiency declined and it became clear that passengers in general preferred the relative economy and comfort of wide-bodied aircraft in which first-class passengers could have beds, business class could have comfortable divans, and everybody had space to move around. The British and the French had proved what could be done. Tens of thousands of people had enjoyed the unique experience. But that was that.

Was it sad? Not particularly. It was they way of the world: 'how the cookie crumbles'.
Was it wasteful? Yes, but nobody much minded.
National pride was enhanced.
France was helped to develop the capability to build big, twenty-first century aircraft for which the Brits made some of the parts.
France can still design and build fighters: Britain has surrendered that capability.
The relative efficiency of the bureaucracies of the two states was sharply differentiated by the whole venture. The French remain focused, chauvinistic and effective. The British have remained indecisive and have continued to axe promising projects every time austerity is called. The British are probably the better engineers: but that fact is always eclipsed by political reality.

Brexit Buffoons, Regulations and Point Protectionism

Boris Johnson has sounded-off again, this time to the Sun, with his demands about Brexit. The transition must be absolutely no more than two years, and the UK should not accept new EU regulations in that period. This keeps him in front of the 'hard Brexiteers' in the Conservative Party, ahead of what is certain to be a very painful party conference for the Prime Minister who decided to hold an election, then ran it the way her close advisers suggested, and so lost her parliamentary majority. Members of the party from all factions know that the Corbyn-McDonnell chances of winning a general election [in England, Wales, and - just possibly - the lost Labour heartlands of Scotland] are astonishingly high. Thus the Tories dare not topple the leader, simply because there is no obvious alternative who could surely prevent the party from disintegrating sufficiently to force a general election.

Thus the Conservatives have to negotiate Brexit: with an increasing majority of the party daily becoming more aware [as are Labour MPs] that the complete separation of the UK from the European Economic Area would put the livelihoods of all sixty million people who depend on the UK economy in grave jeopardy. The Minority of fervent Brexiteers, together with the ambitious chancers who have joined them, assert that the UK can open up huge vistas of trade all over the world, by making trade agreements with a whole raft of countries under WTO Rules.

The World Trade Organisation had its origins in GATT - the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - which was set up alongside the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [normally called the World Bank] and the International Monetary Fund [IMF] by the victorious allies at the end of the Second World War in the belief that the two devastating wars of the twentieth century were largely economic in origin. The USSR was wholly, dogmatically convinced that the First World War was the result of expansionist imperialist competition between the European powers; and they ascribed the second to a re-run of the same conflict between a resurgent Germany and the 'Anglo-Saxon' states that had succeeded in 1918 and then dissipated the fruits of victory in the Depression of the 'thirties. The USA and the UK shared the view that the competitive inefficiencies of capitalism had exacerbated the economic problems of the late 'twenties and early 'thirties. The idea behind the new system was to provide transparent means by which each economy could grow as part of a successful international community.

The USSR soon withdrew from active participation in the institutions, and compelled its satellites to leave as well. Then the international organisations served the 'capitalist' world, in an uneasy relationship with the 'third world' of notionally 'non-aligned' countries [which asserted their independence of both the USSR-led and US-led pattern of alliances that maintained the cold war from 1949 to 1992]. During that period the GATT became the WTO, and had to accommodate itself to a global reality where the rhetoric of free trade was greatly modified by each country building up defensive mounds of regulations that kept out many imports that other countries could offer them in greater quantity and of more sophisticated design than their own factories  could produce; without imposing tariffs that openly breached WTO rules. When such rules failed, and a government wanted to exclude some import, they could - and did - simply impose 'extraordinary' tariffs, usually 'temporarily' to keep out the unwelcome export. That is what I have called point protectionism in this blog. The recent spat engineered in the USA by Boeing is merely one of thousands of examples.

If Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are such starry-eyed innocents that they believe that WTO Rules will be enough to ensure that the UK can make a safe transit into a post-EU trading world, they are profoundly dangerous.