silver2 wrote:
Electrohydraulics,
Polycell Tiles,
Vulcan works,
Conveyancer,
.... so remind me once again Margaret T, how does this country pay its way anymore?
If these industries were paying their way then why did they end up closing down?
The argument seems to be that the government should have subsidised them to keep them open, which doesn't sound like the country paying its way, it sounds more like other businesses were having to pay their way for them.
The harsh fact was the UK manufacturing sector was not as competitive as its foreign counterparts, ie when you take into account productivity against wages at home compared to abroad, other countries were producing things at better value for money. So it makes sense that the UK focuses on things where it is more productive than other countries (ie the financial services sector) and exports these services and imports manufactured goods from abroad.
Of course the UK being heavily based on the financial services sector meant we were more exposed than most others when the global crash came in 2008, given that that was a crash of the financial services sector. Taking that into account, the UK has come out of it not as badly off as it could have done, when you see the disasters that have befallen places like Greece, Ireland, and the looming problems in Portugal, Spain etc, the UK has ridden out the storm fairly well, so all these people who think the UK economy is a basketcase are well off the mark.
Also our manufacturing sector is not completely dead, certain things like pharmaceuticals the UK is still a world leader.
I think people overestimate manufacturing and producing things - in the era when we had more of a manufacturing economy (in the 1960s and 1970s) were things great back then? No we had massive problems with inflation, unemployment, strikes, industrial unrest, worse than we do today. If we wanted to reorient our economy back to being a manufacturing economy then we would need to compete with China, Germany etc, which would mean we would need to start cutting wages and the overall standard of living significantly until we had got our productivity levels back to theirs. Remember as well that in China, where the government artificially pushes down the value of their currency to make their exports cheap to the rest of the world, their domestic citizens suffer in terms of cripplingly high prices for anything that is imported, so their standards of living are much lower than in Europe/USA.
