This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
On a bittersweet day in June, pottery workers clapped as clay was rolled into Denby’s Derbyshire kilns for the last time. Denby Pottery Company, a 200-year-old British firm, is shutting its doors. A part of our culture and common life has been lost.
You can quantify the death of a great British brand in loss of jobs, exports and GDP, but the true impact is always much larger. It’s a loss felt in the items missing from department store shelves; the knowledge that a broken plate or a torn garment will never be replaced. For the local area, a whole way of life, a facet of identity and regional purpose, has been torn away. Even if pottery workers retrain or find other work, skills acquired over decades will go to waste. The sense of collective dignity that comes from making something that one knows to be useful and believes to be beautiful, something bigger than a pay packet or food on the table, is almost impossible to recover when it goes.
We have come to expect the death of British industrial giants as acts of God or the market — and thus tragically inevitable. We have been told for decades that this is the price of progress, and that a rising tide would raise all boats. Yet for many workers and communities, the waters haven’t lifted them up and have instead enveloped them. Economic growth is largely stagnant outside of London and the South East, and across the country real wages have barely risen since the financial crash of 2008.
The average British household yearly income is £4,000 lower than that of the typical German family. Manufacturing only makes up 9–10 per cent of British GDP, well behind the European average of 16 per cent, or the industrial might of Germany’s 18 per cent. Nothing about the death of British industry is inevitable or accidental.
According to a spokesperson for Denby, the company’s decline was caused by escalating employment costs and soaring energy costs which had “squeezed the business financially”. This was not a bolt from the blue. Wage compression between the skilled and less skilled and higher taxes have steadily driven up the cost of employing workers. Labour’s national insurance rise saw the average cost of employing a worker increase by £900 a year. Whilst it was conflict in the Gulf that helped push Denby’s energy costs over the edge, Britain has long had the highest industrial energy prices in Europe.
The exclusion of the ceramics industry from government “supercharger” energy support for industry was the final death knell for the company in this country. Denby’s subsidiaries in the lower energy cost economies of the United States, Korea and China are still going.
We cannot keep having the same conversations every time a British company goes to the wall. We have to start saving British industry for the long term by planning for the future and creating an environment in which business can thrive, rather than needing state rescue. The proposed nationalisation of British Steel exemplifies this problem: the Government will spend billions of public funds to keep unprofitable companies alive, but it will not take action to decrease the market price of energy and labour in Britain.
We allow industries to die in predictable ways, destroying centuries of heritage in a fit of absence of mind. Taxes on employment and energy, combined with an environmental strategy that forces us to keep locally available hydrocarbons locked in the ground and leaves us vulnerable to global suppliers, have all been pursued without any thought as to consequences.
Far from lurid visions of corporate lobbyists running the country, the British business community has been dangerously excluded from decision-making. Industry leaders in ceramics warned the government of their vulnerability to energy costs — and were simply ignored.
There is an inability to think about policy in a holistic fashion. Immediate needs — for greater tax revenues, carbon reductions or higher public spending — override any sense of strategy and vision. This leads to policies that not only have huge unforeseen costs, but are often self-defeating.
The net zero policies that pushed up industrial energy costs have destroyed the business model of one of the most sustainable pottery makers in the world. Denby recycled 100 per cent of its waste materials, mined its materials locally and ran its own water-treatment plant to prevent pollution.
This sustainable pottery will now be replaced by vastly more polluting international competitors in countries such as India and China. But instead of looking at sustainability in a global, long-term, strategic way, the government is pushing full speed ahead towards an arbitrary net zero target, even if it shreds British manufacturing and does little to reduce global emissions.
Companies such as Denby have a sentimental value, but sentiment itself should not be dismissed. Denby not only created affordable, durable tableware for the masses, it also made cheap ceramics for a dozen emergent industries. The British potteries in general are a central part of the story of the industrial revolution, demonstrating a link between traditional crafts, scientific innovation and economic dynamism. Industrialisation was itself a kind of early modern “onshoring”, as mass-produced domestic textiles and ceramics replaced imports from Asia.
Ceramics were also an important part of the rise of ethical consumption, as seen with figures like Josiah Wedgwood, a prominent slave trade abolitionist whose pottery company produced the famous “Am I not a man and a brother?” medallion.
The basic raw material of economic growth isn’t just the industrial inputs of minerals and machine tools, but the vision and efforts of workers and entrepreneurs. The histories of national industries fire the imagination of the skilled labourers and business leaders upon which our prosperity depends. Such industries are local leaders, inculcating habits of work and building pride in place in the areas that need it most.
Offshored, foreign-owned, anonymised and consumption — based, the modern British economy is increasingly untethered from local and national belonging. The industrial economy of the nineteenth century gave rise to political consciousness and civic belonging. Industrialists were deeply invested in the places where they built their prosperity. The peripatetic, globalised wealth of today is utterly lacking in this loyalty. In over-relying on it, Britain has impoverished itself in more ways than one.
In Italy, there is a 10 per cent tax credit for “design and aesthetic ideation”, alongside tax relief on the “reshoring” of industry. In France, traditional crafts are a key part of a national industrial strategy, with €340 million earmarked for state support of the arts and crafts sector. France also offers tax credits.
Britain is bad at the macro-level policies of setting favourable economic conditions and equally poor at assisting specific sectors with cultural, social and strategic value. British politicians can only think in terms of short-term subsidies, bail-outs and nationalisations, perpetually rewarding failure instead of encouraging success. Actual industrial strategy and planning, worked out in close collaboration with key national industries, trade unions, professional organisations and business leaders, is still a fantasy in a country where economic policy is set by committees in the Treasury and the Bank of England.
If locally-rooted consumer goods manufacturing is suffering, so are strategic sectors such as shipbuilding, ports, steel and a dozen other areas key to national security and resilience. Quite apart from the vast social cost of losing regional industries, we are becoming ever more vulnerable in an increasingly dangerous world. The conflict with Russia has exposed the limitations of Western production lines and European energy dependence.
In an era of digitisation in a country run by sociologists, political scientists and economists, we have lost touch with the fundamentals of life. The governing visions of spiritual purpose and material reality are neglected in favour of an airy middle realm of calculation and optimisation. The age-old understanding that societies exist to organise labour in collective endeavours, exercise mastery over matter and energy, and to heighten the ethical and aesthetic imagination of its citizens has been lost or diluted in favour of midwit-dominated, Newsnight-tier debates over tax and spend, money markets and carbon emissions.
Commentators are occasionally baffled by the fact that Russia, which has an economy that is smaller than Italy’s, can wage war on a scale that tests the resources of the West and has thrown the entire European continent into crisis. Making stuff and producing energy cheaply will always matter. British policymakers should remember the words of Rudyard Kipling: whatever the power of the Gods of the Market Place, the Gods of the Copybook Headings, the eternal truths, will outlast them all.
