Quote Originally Posted by grahamw48 View Post
I agree, but again I lay that at the door of the govts of the day, because they had the power to do something about the communist-run unions, just as more recent ones had the power to curb the banks and their suicidal tendencies.

Throughout the 70s I was running British cars (BL and Ford), which were no better or worse for reliability than the foreign competition, but I also noticed how the rust-bucket Japanese ones...albeit with 'FREE' radio and remote-opening boot-lid were rotting away on people's drives after a couple of years.
The foot in the door was there though.

All down to good marketing and loss-leading pricing from the Japs, and hungrily lapped up by gullible British consumers. I should know, I was SELLING to them for a living.

We simply dropped the ball.

The US has gone the same way with imports, and the result has been the same for them too.

This is nothing that can't be fixed in the future, given the will to do so and the support of the British public.
I totally agree we should support british industry but its very very hard to do now as a consumer. Strangely some of the comapnies which have hidden there Britishness via accident or design actually seem to fair quite well.

But the days of making things from scratch in the UK are long gone as they are for many countries. Products are made from sources all over the world and we just have to get enough of the percentages of the products to keep Britiain up there.

In some cases we do the real money from products is often not the actual production but from the design and then reselling of the product. So we don't just need people who can work in factories but design, R&D product research, Logistics and customer care. Look at Dyson for example or Apple in America make milions even billions but don't make the product..

Countries like Phill and other south eastern asian countries have found this where the raw materials, design instruction and even managment is shipped in and the product is shipped out. low tax or tax free areas are created and in the end really all that is left once the labour prices rises or people start to complain about environmental issues is a work force who got paid ( a good thing), a community which got some extra income from the workers (a good thing) and a empty factory with maybe some tax if the company did not dodge out of it. Plus often massive clear up costs or a environmental hazzard left..


Look how India is finding they are needing to outsource to places like the Philippines the outsource work they do but while its useful for the workers of Phill the real money stays in India or even in the UK where some of the outsourcing companies who run the outsourcing companies in Indian are based and owned...