The Tale of Peter Who Thought Things Weren't Made In Britain

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The alarm rings and our economic nationalist awakes - we'll call him Peter. Rising from slumbering in his Silentnight bed (made in Barnoldswick in that bit of Lancashire that used to be Yorkshire), Peter stumbles across the room to the shower to conduct his morning ablutions.

Peter's a traditional sort of chap and likes good old-fashioned soap - Imperial Leather (made by Cussons in Manchester). It's the day of the week for hair washing and Peter lathers up with Head & Shoulders (from those nice Proctor & Gamble folk in Newcastle) and then shaves with products developed in Reading for Gillette.

His ablutions complete, Peter dresses in clothes nicely washed and pressed by his attentive wife. She uses an Ebac machine (made in Newton Aycliffe up in County Durham) and the washing powder is made by Unilever in the delightfully named Port Sunlight on Merseyside (as is the conditioner that makes everything soft and pleasantly odoured).

Coming downstairs Peter smiles as he ponders today's incisive commentary - a paen to a lost past of British manufacturing. But first it's breakfast - coffee (from Kenco at Banbury in Oxfordshire) with milk and sugar (from British Sugar's plant in Bury St Edmunds), a bowl of cornflakes (made by Kellogg's at Trafford Park) all followed by toast (Warburton's bread from Bolton) with butter (Country Life fresh from Nuneaton) and Baxter's jam (made by the eponymous family business in Moray).

Before leaving the house, Peter sits in the living room (on a sofa made by DFS in Leeds) and flicks through the papers, tutting all the while at the demise of Great Britain as a manufacturing nation. Slipping on his Church's brogues (from Northampton of course) he walks down the garden path and gets into his shiny Jaguar (made at Castle Bromwich in the lovely city of Birmingham) to drive into town.

Arriving at his desk, Peter nurses another coffee (from Nescafe's UK factory at Tutbury in Derbyshire) and gazes out the window (a PVC unit made for Everest in Sittingborne, Kent) trying to get the right combination of words for a corruscating and telling article about how Tory government means Britain no longer makes anything. Peter breaks off for a couple of meetings across the corridor in the big room. There are biscuits (made by United Biscuits up in Carlisle) and more coffee (Nescafe again from Derbyshire) which is served on the fine table (made by Hands in High Wycombe).

Peter returns to his desk - he knows the words he'll use now:

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

It is a terrible thing indeed that Britain no longer makes anything except for sale in "absurdly expensive luxury shops".

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Of course Britain doesn't make anything any more!

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You've all heard it at some point, usually from the grumpy old bloke at the end of the bar.

"There's no manufacturing any more, no proper businesses. Britain doesn't make anything any more"

I suspect that an opinion poll would discover that most Britons share that grumpy old bloke's opinion. And in one respect they're right. We no longer have great big factories teeming with workers. The hooters that mark the start and end of shifts are no longer a feature of every community and children don't finish school on the Friday and start at the mill on Monday.

But the real truth is that Britain does make stuff - really important stuff that's tomorrow's technology. And it employs lots of people.

About one-quarter of the world’s commercial communication satellites are built in Britain and 40% of the world’s small satellites. Most of those are built by Airbus’s Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), the world leader in the field. It has launched 43 satellites since it was started by an academic at Surrey University, Sir Martin Sweeting. The whole space sector directly employs 35,000 people, and the supply-chain accounts for thousands more jobs. London-based Inmarsat is one of the world’s largest satellite operators, specialising in mobile telephony. The space sector has a turnover of about £11 billion a year.

The problem is that modern manufacturing isn't like that old manufacturing, it doesn't employ thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled people. Instead it employs technicians with in-demand skills, engineers and scientists with higher degrees. Today's manufacturing employee is more likely to drive to work in a BMW from a four-bed detached house than to walk there in dungarees carrying a lunch box. I visited one manufacturer - in Oldham, at the heart of the old manufacturing world - where three-quarters of the workforce had a degree including 54 with a PhD.

So what the grumpy bloke at the bar is bemoaning isn't the loss of manufacturing but the loss of the low-skill, low paid unionised manufacturing jobs of times past. Britain still makes stuff - a bewildering variety of stuff from satellites to sugar, from cars to coffee - but it doesn't use millions of workers to do the making. And the problem we have, especially in places like Bradford, is we produce too many people who lack the skills to do modern manufacturing. There are plenty of reasons for this but one thought expressed to me recently was interesting - worth exploring. It was that our education system was designed for that old world, for the production of industrial cannon fodder and a small elite of managers.

We sort of recognised this - Blair's misplaced call for half of young people to go to university reflects the desire to equip people with the skills modern industry needs. And while this failed, turning out too many degrees in tourism studies and too few in engineering, it was a first step in a long road to a system that really does provide for tomorrow's workforce. This isn't the sort of Ken Robinson nonsense about how schools are a bad thing but rather the need to reconsider what the consumers of education - parents and their children - demand. And, for all the cant about creativity, what people want from education is a system that helps children get the knowledge and skills allowing them access to good quality, well-paid employment.

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So Mr Murphy thinks the UK is a "finance dependent economy"?

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I ask this because Richard Murphy and the folks at "Tax Justice Network" think that the UK is a finance dependent economy. And of course that doing that moving-money-around business that we've been doing since the 18th century is damaging our economy.

Just for clarity - according to UKTI:

The financial services industry accounted for 10% of UK GDP and 11% of UK tax receipts. 

That's it? We're a 'finance dependent economy' at 10% of GDP?

This, it seems to me, is a load of nonsense (something Mr Murphy seems to specialise in) - especially since manufacturing - you know we don't make things anymore, don't you - accounts for a mere 12% of GDP.

This "Finance Curse" is just ideology looking for a theory and then making up some statistics to fit the resulting bias.

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Manufacturing - no longer the place for cheap labour...

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And this is a good thing because cheap labour isn't just cheap it's dirty, unsafe and unpleasant - replacing the drudge with robots is a good thing:

Some might say that’s terrible: what are we going to do when there’s no more cheap labour? I look at it the other way around. When there’s no more cheap labour then there’re no more poor people, are there? For by definition people who are getting good wages just aren’t poor. So once we’ve run out of places where we can chase that cheap labour then we’ve actually solved one of humanity’s longest running problems. How in heck do we cure poverty? And we’ll have done it by the only logically sound method known: making everyone rich. Hurrah!

There will still be manufacturing jobs but they will look rather different - as I noted a while back:

I visited a manufacturer the other day. Part of a multi-national business in the electronics industry. Big plant in Chadderton employing about 360 people.

Of those 360 people, 54 have PhDs and over 70% have a degree of some sort.

Rather makes the point that, even if we have a boom in manufacturing, it is't going to provide jobs for 16 year olds who have scraped five GCSEs.

Manufacturing soon becomes a high skill, high value added business filled with society's elite - all graduates, many with higher degrees and all creating, thinking and developing the business.

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A thought on manufacturing...

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I visited a manufacturer the other day. Part of a multi-national business in the electronics industry. Big plant in Chadderton employing about 360 people.

Of those 360 people, 54 have PhDs and over 70% have a degree of some sort.

Rather makes the point that, even if we have a boom in manufacturing, it is't going to provide jobs for 16 year olds who have scraped five GCSEs.


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