During the Golden Age the American manufacturing invasion of Britain accounted for 6.9% of our GDP and we had controlled outward investment in an effort to push money back into British Industry. Our economic growth was stable and we paid little attention to inward FDI and home grown technological innovation, preferring instead to concentrate on our traditional core manufacturing. Unlike Germany and Japan who used post war aid to reconfigure their industry into a modern equivalent, Britain wandered into the new era of Globalisation with one foot firmly in the past and nothing to counter the industrial rise of developing countries, much less an oil crisis or the power of the Trade Unions.
The rise of East Asia as an economic force and the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986, releasing the Finance industry from traditional barriers and opening up the financial markets, helped fuel a sharp increase in foreign investment in Thatcher’s Britain. All with the smallest amount of brouhaha