UK manufacturing - why is it disappearing?

[bornfree]

60s & 70s: UK manufacturers and unions failed to respond to Far East competition. Mate of mine worked for BSA and recalled how overmanned they were. Good motorbikes (I'm told) but 2 or 3 men for a 1 man job. Japanese competition murdered them.

80s: Much needed restructuring but some domestic industry not protected. As others have said, the service sector was seen as the new engine for the economy. Notice the difference with strategically important sector such as defence. BAe, RR, Vickers etc. As a major European power with an "active" foreign policy, you can't afford not to be able to build your own weapons.

90s: I've nearly always been in manufacturing and in the middle of the decade was in rolling stock. Years of alternate periods of feast and famine in terms of orders from inconsistent government policy hampered investment by companies. Whereas France and Germany buy extra trains and have them just sitting in a shed to replace a broken loco, we bought bare minimum. They lavish money on this sector, we don't. And TGVs sell well. The factory I worked at has now gone.

Moves away from dull, profitable (though small margin) manufacturing in heavy industry to sexy boom sectors. GEC sits on piles of cash under Lord Weinstock which Sir Edward Simpson (I think) squanders in his drive into new technology as Marconi. A great British company emasculated.

00s: For the last 5 years the UK has been the second biggest exporter of armaments. High tech industry which any UK government will protect. Cars, buses, merchant shipping etc. can go to the wall though.

A mixture of what I've studied, heard and experienced. I now work for a manufacturing company in the Middle East and they pay an Indian CATIA designer £500 a month. Their whole business depends upon cheap labour.

One important variable was left out in the manufacturing equation.It is economical to manufacture where you have got
1)Cheap raw material (Pre WW2, our colonies in Asia and Africa provided at no cost. We don't have the mineral resources unfortunately)
2)Cheap labour : We either do not have enough skilled labour or they are costly.
The japs dominated the 80s but have started moving their base to China & India because of 1 & 2 .

Probably because of 1 & 2 we started focussing on services sector but again we are again losing out on 2.

High Tech :We still are one of the biggest arms exporter but came across this interesting article
http://www.defencetalk.com/first-mad...nveiled-22236/
Why are we importing armoured vehicles from Singapore? Cant we make them here ? Now we neglect the high-tech sector and depend too much on EU/USA for our needs.
Compare the progress of Chinese/Indian space programmes with ours (don't consider the ESA).
We just don't have the aspirations any more as a nation.

[Fred Bloggs]

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.

Sad, and true.

[sasguru]

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.

Hi expat!

I fear you misunderstand sockpuppetry. You're supposed to be someone different from your original persona

[TimberWolf]

Meanwhile http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...MC-Bltn=CFKEIB

1970s/80s new gas fields exploited
2003 we are still a net gas exporter
2004 we imported 5% of our gas
2010 will need to import half of our gas
2015 will need to import 3/4 of our gas

Meanwhile, "almost 35 per cent of UK electricity now comes from gas-fired power stations, up from less than 5 per cent in 1990".

Mind you 2015 is about when the global economy will go t1ts up too.

[Addanc]

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.

<Wield Wooden Spoon>
The last good UK PM studied chemistry at Oxford.
</Wield Wooden Spoon>

[Addanc]

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

pinning the tale on the donkey.

[threaded]

<Wield Wooden Spoon>
The last good UK PM studied chemistry at Oxford.
</Wield Wooden Spoon>

An helped invent Mr Whippy!

[Tarquin Farquhar]

Hi expat!

I fear you misunderstand sockpuppetry. You're supposed to be someone different from your original persona

OK I admit it's not all original thought, but some of it is.