Manufacturing leads the way !

StevieJ

Generali wrote: »

The future for British manufacturing lies in the same place as the recent past: industrial design, specialised chemicals, pharma, cars and the like. Stuff where you can add a lot of value and it is hard for people to come along and compete with you.

There's no point in paying people a couple of quid a day to stitch T-Shirts when even the Asian workers are getting thoroughly fed up with wages like that.

I agree, high barriers to entry, that is where the UK R&D proficiency should kick in if we are to survive robustly in the future.

Thrugelmir

Generali wrote: »

There's no point in paying people a couple of quid a day to stitch T-Shirts when even the Asian workers are getting thoroughly fed up with wages like that.

You mean like retail, call centres, coffee shops etc in the UK which require specialist education and training.

Thrugelmir

blueboy43 wrote: »

By that analogy we could produce wine and grow more crops, as it could also do "wonders for our economy".

There's at least 4 good English wine producers that I know of.

Agriculture is another matter. When did we last produce enough is imported from North America for example. Has been for many years.

Generali

Thrugelmir wrote: »

There's at least 4 good English wine producers that I know of.

The decent English wine I have had was from a vineyard in Kent and it was pretty good up until the moment you looked at the price tag.

Their table wine I'd have happily paid slightly over the £5.00 that seems to be a significant price point for wine consumers in the UK, especially people like me for whom the average cellaring time is from time of purchase until dinner time. £6-7.00 would have been ok.

They wanted £10 a bottle and it just wasn't good enough to be worth it. I'm sure they were very efficient and they were very nice and professional people and had lovely gardens. It wasn't worth a 20-30% premium over what you'd pay for something similar from Europe or the New World.

Jennifer_Jane

Mr_Mumble wrote: »

Talking of British IP, mobile devices would be a heckuva lot worse if it wasn't for ARM :cool:. Everything from the Iphone to the Nintendo DS relies on British designed processors.... though none of that will be counted in manufacturing numbers.
...]

As you say, won't be counted in manufacturing numbers as it receives it's income from licensing royalties rather than manufacturing. But am so glad that you mentioned it. Have held the share since the dot. com days, and the share has increased like mighty over the last year.

blueboy43

Thrugelmir wrote: »

There's at least 4 good English wine producers that I know of.

Agriculture is another matter. When did we last produce enough is imported from North America for example. Has been for many years.

The point is, that almost 200 years ago Ricardo explained that we should specialize in whatever we are good at & then trade - and happily used the example of Portugese wine.

We have an inbalance of trade, but it if you think its going to be solved by making low value utter tat, then think again.

One of the assumptions on trade was originally that freight was free (clearly wrong but there you go) but the thing about lots of low value services (most retail, coffee shops, etc, etc), is that it is pretty difficult for Mr Chinaman living in Shanghai to actually provide that service.

Even internet retailers just move low paid jobs in out of town retailers to out of town picking warehouses and white man delivery drivers.