Industrial investment in 1979 wouldn't have worked.

[AtW]

That is my humble opinion on the matter; it would have been good money after bad in part due to the culture of the British worker circa 1979

Why Rolls-Royce is still making good jet engines that sell around the world?

Short term thinking is the biggest problem in UK - basically lack of long term planning on many levels, starting from the top. Everything else just followed from it.

Taking 20 years to build a fooking 120 miles of railway? Chinese would have done in a year and every fooking MP who'd try to save country side views of his rich voters would be put into hard labour camp as lesson.

[DodgyAgent]

Why Rolls-Royce is still making good jet engines that sell around the world?

Short term thinking is the biggest problem in UK - basically lack of long term planning on many levels, starting from the top. Everything else just followed from it.

Taking 20 years to build a fooking 120 miles of railway? Chinese would have done in a year and every fooking MP who'd try to save country side views of his rich voters would be put into hard labour camp as lesson.

So why are you living here?

[sasguru]

Well Feck off then you Oily little pleb

Was having this discussion with the missus this weekend: at the moment I work from home and could be based anywhere in the world with a reliable internet connection OR I could easily get a job in Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, probably the US, maybe Japan.

We are going to do the emigration thing within the next 5 years, there's no point in living in a country in fast decline - and with the possibility of major economic chaos*

*People forget that this is the most indebted country in Europe.

[AtW]

So why are you living here?

It's my home.

[Gibbon]

Why Rolls-Royce is still making good jet engines that sell around the world?

Because they are at the high end of the technology market, not easily replicated,
and they had lots of government money in the defence sector to tide them through until the recent past when the CO2 emissions and oil prices have forced airlines to buy new leaner engines. Between 2000 - 2005 there were very few software types contracting here, now there is over a hundred.

[MarillionFan]

It's my home.

Benefit scrounger.

[sasguru]

Because they are at the high end of the technology market, not easily replicated,
and they had lots of government money .

Wow government intervention works. Every country know this except this one.

[original PM]

Wow government intervention works. Every country know this except this one.

only when there is a clear benefit for keeping things going.

you seem to think we would have been better subsidising industries which employee people to dig rocks out of the ground with the bare hands... in the 20th century

ffs

[AtW]

Because they are at the high end of the technology market, not easily replicated

And why UK workers are building good cars, albeit for foreign companies like Honda, Nissan, BMW etc?

Janan, France, Germany (especially) and even USA kept industry and out of those countries only UK totally pissed away the inheritance from the industrial revolution. Can't even build a fooking railway now quickly and cheaply.

[Gibbon]

Wow government intervention works. Every country know this except this one.

You're taking that out of context, the defence market wasn't intervention. By 1979 it was too late, the rot was set in. It wasn't a matter of just infrastructure and investment, the work force needed a culture change.