Bugger the Olympics, here's an international competition that really matters. And now we don't even qualify for the knock-out stages: the UK has slipped below the Top 10 for manufacturing.
Strikes me this is the single failing of the governments 2010-2024, and of course earlier ones, too - but one sort of hopes Conservative governments will do better. Actually, having said that, Labour with its Union roots should be less prone to thinking a nation can busk it with service industries alone, however lucrative.
It's been noticed in the MSM that the entire thrust of Miliband's energy policy has been couched in terms of reducing energy bills and security of supply, and that CO2 targets feature nowhere in the roll-out rhetoric. Labour knows what plays with voters, and what they're willing to see there money spent on. Well; as discussed here at length the "reducing bills" aspects is utter hogwash. But there's at least an argument that some forms of renewable energy can contribute to security of supply (once they've been built from Chinese components, that is). So - if security of supply is a Labour issue, as well as "good jobs" - may we expect an intelligent revival of at least some of the more critically strategic manufacturing sectors? High-grade steel-making comes rapidly to mind and I'm sure readers will all have their own favourite candidates.
ND
7 comments:
Can we make high-grade steel from scrap? As I understand it the UK will have no capacity to make steel from iron ore within a year or so.
My understanding is - no, you can't. And if it's the Chinese that have bought our primary steel works & then shut them down, it's a capital strategic blunder (on our part) of the first order
What has constantly amazed me is that politicians think they can reduce the nation to an 18th century lifestyle but they will be unaffected. It may be true that we won’t have civil unrest but I think there will be other effects that will be inescapable.
ND - I recommend this book, 20 years old but still relevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers
Great Power ascendancy (over the long term or in specific conflicts) correlates strongly to available resources and economic durability; military overstretch and a concomitant relative decline are the consistent threats facing powers whose ambitions and security requirements are greater than their resource base can provide for. He predicts that continued deficit spending, especially on military build-up, will be the single most important reason for decline of any great power.
One of his interesting historical points is that at the time of the Battle Of Hastings, China was producing steel at a rate that the UK only reached around 1830, well into the Industrial Revolution.
@anonymous at 8.47
Nobody made meaningful amounts of steel until the 1850s. It was the invention of the Bessemer process by an Englishman called Henry Bessemer which paved the way for the world to move from Iron to steel.
Well the PPE graduates and Minford decided manufacturing was passe. The replacement is for everyone to retrain as barristers, marketing consultants and hairdressers and estate agents.
We now see that was not such a smart idea, the wheel has turned.
But we will have to work much more cheaply and in highly efficient houses heated by glowworms. As ever there is a snag to everything
Dustybloke.
The consequences will be an economy that is unable to sustain its public sector pay and pension commitments. Forfeiture of pension either by economics or by brain drain and a residual population that will have had enough of being pension slaves for retirements they cannot dream of affording for themselves.
The hidden catastrophe is the 500k pa brain drain which is overshadowed by the gargantuan mass immigration figures.
We have African 'carers' filling this area who are morbidly obese and will be a drain on the NHS soon if they aren't already. I'm talking waddling fat. Probably in poorer physical health than their clients.
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