UK manufacturing - why is it disappearing?

[Churchill]

The real fact is that we are crap at manufacturing, our work is generally second rate and we are apatehic towards our employers.

When was the last time you heard a British workie say "I love my job, I love my company and I want to give them back the very best that I can give"?

Quite a lot of the boys and girls who worked in the Clyde Shipyards!

[Fred Bloggs]

When was the last time you heard a British workie say "I love my job, I love my company and I want to give them back the very best that I can give"?

Last time I said it was in 1981 before the slump really set in big time in the chemical industry and tons of big projects were canned permanently.

[minestrone]

Quite a lot of the boys and girls who worked in the Clyde Shipyards!

There is a famous story when they were building the QE2 and they were taking the beds on board you could see the line of workies walking out the other side of the ship taking them home.

[Doggy Styles]

The real fact is that we are crap at manufacturing, our work is generally second rate and we are apatehic towards our employers.

When was the last time you heard a British workie say "I love my job, I love my company and I want to give them back the very best that I can give"?

My brother-in-law and his four employees. He set up a small light engineering firm a few years ago, originally in a big shed in his back garden.

He is developing new equipment that is way ahead of the market. However, it took him years to get investment without being ripped off. He couldn't find any serious investors here in the UK. He eventually went with a Dutch firm, and things are looking good.

[Tarquin Farquhar]

Jeez, another industry completely obliterated. The UK's last TV manufacturing plant closed a few weeks ago too. The UK's only wind turbine factory closed a couple of months ago. WTF is going on?

Just the continuation, or possibly the end-game, of a decades-long process of industrial decline. Most sectors of British society have contributed to it, whether consciously or not.

A white collar has always been more attractive than a blue one. Even in the 60s most students aimed at a career sitting in an office rather than designing or making anything. This was evident many a long year before Thatcher formalised the idea that the country as a whole could live off just the white-collar work and dispense with the blue-collar. Compare this with (surprise!) Germany, where if you ask the manager of an engineering company or department what he does for a living, he or she will say "an engineer", not "a manager" as would happen here. (Worse, most British managers seem to think that management is a status rather than an activity, but that's another story).

Also, as noted above, this is a country riddled with corruption, with little chance of doing anything about it because of the smug belief that others are worse.

This is a phenomenally lazy country, with most people's ambition seemingly being to amass enough money to acquire branded consumer goods: whether by owning property in an inflationary housing market (mis-named a "healthy" market by those who hope to profit from it), by becoming "famous", or just by robbery or the lottery.

Britain is also sadly anti-intellectual. At the underclass level (and we have one of the biggest in the world), learning is despised. Even in the middle class, it is ignored and undervalued. I never hear people in Germany or France say that they are no good at maths, with the sort of laugh that implies that that doesn't matter, or even that one's education was more "Arts" than that. But I do hear people in those other countries show learning and its application in all of everyday life. For example in Germany I heard an English-speaker describe a piece of humour as "puckish". Another English-speaker asked what that meant, and it was a German who replied that it was from Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow, from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I fear that few British people could have recalled that so easily; far less quote from, say, Goethe or Racine.

[PM-Junkie]

We have nobody to blame but ourselves.....as a society, we look upon engineers and technicians as something we have just stepped in. Other countries like Germany hold a lot of respect for such people, so kids aspire to be engineers and technicians.

Couple that with the fact that so few politicians have science or technical qualifications or backgrounds, and it's small wonder we don't have much industry.

.....it's the same reason they screw up the armed forces and military policy. Try naming an MP who is ex-services.

[sasguru]

Who cares when you can make so much money predicting the stock-market

[Tarquin Farquhar]

We have nobody to blame but ourselves.....as a society, we look upon engineers and technicians as something we have just stepped in. Other countries like Germany hold a lot of respect for such people, so kids aspire to be engineers and technicians.

Couple that with the fact that so few politicians have science or technical qualifications or backgrounds, and it's small wonder we don't have much industry.

.....it's the same reason they screw up the armed forces and military policy. Try naming an MP who is ex-services.

Paddy Ashdown.

Vote Lib Dem.

[DimPrawn]

Who cares when you can make so much money predicting the stock-market

and buying and selling property.

[TimberWolf]

and buying and selling property.

Nice avatar!