Germany once admired British workmanship – but that was a long time ago: Guardian

CLAPTON

chewmylegoff wrote: »

Why? It has remained steady as a % of german GDP for 20 years.

In general, with productivity growth one would expect a mature economy to develop services and luxury items as overall whealth grows and that things like manufacturing and agriculture would decline in percentage terms.


I don't have the facts and figures about Germany but they have chosen to concentrate on manufacturing and are currently booming due the the huge export demand from Russia, China, India etc for high quality cars.


Different countries tend to develop different areas of competitive advantage; nothing wrong with that and if we all followed the 'manufacturing is good' mantra then prices would fall and the business would be over supplied.

Whether the boom in the Germany export markets will continue is for anyone to guess.

macaque_2

julieq wrote: »

Germany is an interesting place for industry. In fact far from being world class - there are good bits - much of it comes from smaller private companies who cut margins until they fold - I visited one a couple of years ago where the proprietor maintains an in house injection moulding facility basically as a hobby, when this can be done in China for a fraction of the cost - that makes him uncompetitive. This is sustainable on a declining trend mostly because there's a very parochial attitude towards "Made in Germany", but the bigger companies outsource manufacture the same as most countries do - it's highly scalable and there's very little added value in basic manufacture.

It's one of these great myths of the chattering classes - most of whom don't work in manufacturing anyway - and of the unions - who are obsessed with returning to the "utopia" of the 1970s when our own manufacturing was utterly uncompetitive because of closed shops, overmanning and hard core demarcation - that the UK has lost its "heavy" manufacturing base and should be doing what Germany does. We do manufacture, we could probably do more, but chiefly we earn our money through design excellence and services which generally are valuable. That's one of the reasons why it's dumb to regulate financial services out of existence. We're CHOSEN by outside investors to manufacture some things into Europe because we have fairly flexible employment law by European standards and we've shown we're good at it. There are some things - glass being one - which more or less has to be manufactured locally to point of use.

Of course if you want to believe in a utopian past - bearing in mind we were able to rape the world for cheap raw materials until fairly recently and had little competition from the developing world, so our "success" was somewhat illusory - and you think that we're heading to hell on a handcart because of the way things have changes, then you're not going to accept any of this. But I work basically into manufacturing industry and it's a perfectly healthy picture. Really.

This sounds good but I really cannot agree with this. German manufacturers are generally doing well (both big and small) and some particularly well.

The idea that the Unions want to return to the 1970's does not stack up. A high proportion of UK manufacturing is non unionised. Where there are Unions, they are nothing like the 70's. The last basition of Union power can be found in the public sector and some private monopolies.

In the UK, we take a short term view on investment and this means that we lose a fat slice of our manufacturing with every economic cycle. Recently we have seen the demise of a swathe of chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. What the Germans have anticipated (but we havn't) is that manufacturing costs in India and China are rocketing.

You cannot have 'design excellence and services' in a vacuum. Without manufacturing, 'design and services' wither and die. When chemical companies started outsourcing 15 years ago, the arguement was that the R&D would still be done here. It was true for a while and then R&D followed manufacturing.

You made the comment: 'That's one of the reasons why it's dumb to regulate financial services out of existence.' We should not just regulate them out of existance, we should rip their limbs off while we are at it. It is financial services that are behind asset stripping of valuable UK companies, the destruction of the economy and parasitic reliance on small companies and private lenders and borrowers.

WhiteHorse

The irony is that the Guardian has always been at the forefront of the problem.

ash28

chewmylegoff wrote: »

That argument can equally be applied to the thatcher years, infact even more so as growth was higher during that period iirc. The central point still stands, Blair and Thatcher were in power for similar periods of time and one oversaw a far greater decline in manufacturing than the other, and it wasn't Thatcher.

Interestingly I have been doing some research for a paper on the decline of manufacturing from 1970 to 2010 and some of the stats I have gathered courtesy of NOMIS and ONS are fairly enlightening. The figures once you dig into them show that there were more manufacturing jobs lost under Thatcher between 1979 and 1987 than there were between 1997 and 2008.

manufacturing jobs lost
1979 - 1987 2 million and manufacturing capacity reduced by 20% between 1979 and 1982 - mainly due to a policy induced recession.

1987 - 1997 1 million

1997 - 2008 1.3 million

and the rise in public sector employment - despite the rhetoric about rolling back the state - public sector employment increased substantially too.

1979 - 1997 - 1.1 million

1997 - 2008 1.3 million

One of the things I'm going to be looking at is the creation of private sector jobs through the privatisation of public services - bin men etc - which technically saw the creation of private sector jobs - but paid for by the public sector.

CLAPTON

C_Mababejive wrote: »

Apart from the bit about "Marxist speak" we are in agreement.

My politics are probably somewhere right of Ghenghis Khan and i dont think the constant doting about 2 world wars can ever be linked to the building of Empire and its subsequent decline.

No..in my world we..

Would have a national integrated rail transport infrastructure which ran fast,reliably and safely the length of the country for cargo and passengers and run by one company owned by the state but run by engineers and specialists in the field.

We would severely clamp immigration and have the same kinds of controls that the USA has.

We would have a death by lethal injection policy as an option

We would have no public sale of alcohol save from state registered(not owned) and rigidly policed outlets

We would build a nation which has an interest in financial services but is not enslaved to them. It would also be an engine for innovation and development of specialised products in science,medicine and engineering.

We would build social housing and keep it discrete from private housing. They would be tightly regulated and controlled so that anti social tenants could be ejected and made homeless if necessary.

Littering would be punishable by an on the spot fine of £50 or a week in jail if no payment could be made.

multilingual translation services by public bodies would end

The education system would be overhauled and a new curriculum built on a solid bedrock of maths,English and separate sciences. Troublesome pupils would be excluded to societal sin bins for corrective treatment before they are allowed to return

Please feel free to add further so that we can again make Britain great.

now please tell us, are you in favour of

-motherhood
-apple pie

A._Badger

ash28 wrote: »

Interestingly I have been doing some research for a paper on the decline of manufacturing from 1970 to 2010 and some of the stats I have gathered courtesy of NOMIS and ONS are fairly enlightening. The figures once you dig into them show that there were more manufacturing jobs lost under Thatcher between 1979 and 1987 than there were between 1997 and 2008..

One thing that needs to be borne in mind (and I'm not saying you won't) is the common mistake of assuming that changes happen in isolation and are always the result of government policy. In some respects, Margaret Thatcher's government was as much the victim of forces that had been at work for decades, as was Callaghan's before it.

There were international forces at work throughout - not just the obvious local ones. The loss of manufacturing jobs wasn't confined to the UK, nor was it solely driven by ideology.

julieq

You couldn't really be more wrong Macaque, which given your record is pretty impressive.

There's no difference in investment conditions between companies like, say, Siemens and their British domiciled equivalents, and big companies outsource manufacture pretty much wherever they're based. This isn't just about reduction in costs - although these are significant, a Chinese factory can produce electronics at about 1.15 material cost, where in the West you'd be looking at closer to 1.4 - it's about removal of overhead which doesn't add a great deal of value, because it's highly scalable. There is literally no point investing in a factoryfull of overhead when someone in China will do it for you on the back of a contract manufacturing business. In fact outsourcing to contract manufacture in Western Europe will often make sense from a scalability sense.

Germany is heading for trouble anyway. The model of family owned small companies making marginal or no profit isn't sustainable against global competition, and the costs of their social model don't look sustainable in the medium to long term. As has been mentioned, "Made in Germany" remains important domestically, they're opening up markets to the East, and they're frantically using the EU to erect barriers using increasingly stringent regulations, but it won't hold back the tide forever. You can't entirely argue against the single largest European economy having done many things right, but it's not a clear win or anything like it, and retaining heavy manufacture isn't a passport to riches, quite the reverse in fact. We have in many senses a more flexible and more diverse economic landscape which spreads risk better, and we're not weighed down by the Eurozone to anything like the same extent as Germany.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

I work in the engineering department of one of the UK's top univeristies, with strong links to manufacturing and applications in many industries.We have just been awarded several grants and are flush with cash, but are seriously struggling to recruit both PhD students and postdoc researchers.This problem includes the teaching of maths and science in schools, A Level choices, the status of engineering in our society and employment potential in applied sciences in the UK. It's not something that can be resolved overnight.

Really2

Britain used to admire Germany's workmanship but they constantly some of the least reliable car in warranty claim indexes .

http://www.reliabilityindex.com/

The 10 Worst Cars

Position Make/Model Reliability Rating
1 Mercedes-Benz SL 376.00
2 Mercedes-Benz CL 352.00
3 Land Rover Range Rover 308.00
4 Mercedes-Benz S-Class 274.00
5 Renault Espace 257.00
6 Jeep Grand Cherokee 250.00
7 Mercedes-Benz V-Class 248.00
8 Nissan Pathfinder 245.00
9 Land Rover Freelander 230.00
10 BMW 7 Series 229.00

5 out of 10 aint bad going!!

Looks like we admire Japan and korea.

The 10 Best Cars

1 Kia Picanto 3.00
2 Vauxhall Agila 5.00
3 Suzuki Alto 6.00
4 Honda HR-V 6.00
5 Ford Fiesta 13.00
6 Toyota Corolla 14.00
7 Suzuki Ignis 15.00
8 Volvo S40 16.00
9 Honda Jazz 18.00
10 Mazda 2 19.00

I dont think that british goods lack quality of workmanship I don't think others do either judging Rolls Royce and Jaguar Land Rovers figures but they are expensive (may not be British owned, but the workmanship is British still).
We cant Churn out cheap quality goods any more, that is the crux of it.

Kennyboy66

chewmylegoff wrote: »

That argument can equally be applied to the thatcher years, infact even more so as growth was higher during that period iirc. The central point still stands, Blair and Thatcher were in power for similar periods of time and one oversaw a far greater decline in manufacturing than the other, and it wasn't Thatcher.

Growth wasn't higher during the Thatcher years compared with Blair.

Growth averaged just less than 0.6% per quarter under Thatcher and averaged 0.7% a quarter under Blair (who clearly timed his exit well).

There was however a greater decline in manufacturing under Blair / Brown and the growth numbers are almost irrelevant to this.

There might have been a bigger decline in manufacturing jobs under Thatcher than Blair.