It’s not a storm — it’s the climate

BAE Systems: The Company Britain Couldn’t Afford to Lose

2 October 2026

Summary:

There was no garage, no single founder, and definitely no master plan.

BAE Systems is what survived when dozens of British companies went through a century of wars, cancellations, nationalisation, privatisation and near-bankruptcy. Hawker, Vickers, Avro, de Havilland, English Electric, Marconi and Royal Ordnance and many others were all absorbed.

Almost all of their names have disappeared. One company remains.

In 2025 BAE Systems generated £30.7bn in sales and £3.3bn in underlying EBIT. It ended the year with an £83.6bn order backlog and over 111,000 employees. It builds nuclear submarines, warships, combat aircraft, armoured vehicles, missiles, radar and electronic warfare systems.

Its largest market isn’t the UK. It’s the United States.

In our longest episode yet, Colin Brown and Martti Wallin tell the story in five acts and here are some of the many highlights:

– How the Battle of Britain was won by an industrial system, not just “the few”
– Freddie Page, the chauffeur’s son who built the Canberra and the Lightning at Warton
– The cancelled TSR-2, and why Britain had to learn to build aircraft with Germany, Italy and France
– Nationalisation in 1977, privatisation in 1981, and the record £1.2bn loss that nearly ended it all
– The Marconi deal that created BAE Systems, and why it chose America over a European merger
– Selective sovereignty: what a nation must own, and what it can share with allies
– What Europe should do next with its defence industry