Wartime industrial experience failed to modernize postwar British consumer industries for multiple structural reasons

Evidence

That this experience was not then translated into the postwar modernization of British consumer industries is a complex story involving the return of loaned American machine tools, depleting British plants of the only modern equipment they had, the limited purchasing power of the British public, the diversion of the majority of scientists, engineers, and technicians to employment in the government sector, and, not least, the sheer inability of British management to innovate in the way that their German, French and Italian counterparts did—all of which countries still have domestically owned car firms. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 406

Categorization

• QUESTION: This bundles several competing explanations for British postwar industrial decline — worth chasing which historians weight most heavily.
• XREF: The ‘British decline’ historiography here parallels the Mont Pèlerin debate about why dirigiste or corporatist economies underperformed. — connects to: Wartime aircraft production industrialized a previously craft-based British industry — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 406
• SEED: Article angle: the return of loaned American machine tools as a little-known cause of British deindustrialization.

Broader Connections

• Wartime aircraft production industrialized a previously craft-based British industry #complicates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 406