I confess I’ve never quite understood why milk needs to be hauled all over the place. Mansel Davies run the stuff from here over to Holland, which has a huge dairy industry of its own, and backload orange juice out of Rotterdam. Mate of mine in Sussex runs an organic dairy farm and sends an artic tanker a week to France. Given the supposed high costs of transport, someone somewhere must still be making money out of it.
Quite agree with you that we could buy a lot more British stuff if we put our minds to it; food especially. However, it’s generally more profitable to export it, and it goes without saying that our own chosen trade benefits hugely from this.
Of your chosen list, we’d have to import iron ore for the steel, since AFAIK our own deposits would be uneconomical to mine; same goes for coal whether you like it or not, even if the pits still existed they’d be hopelessly uneconomic to run as deep mines and apart from that most of it’s high-sulphur hard coal which is no good for modern blast furnaces.Forestry’s already a big industry but we simply don’t have the space to do it much more intensively, and the environmental lobby is another factor to consider. Apart from Morgans our car industry is foreign-owned which somewhat negates the idea of buying “British” cars; I doubt the Nissan, Honda and Toyota factories in the UK would last long if we started blocking imports from abroad.
As for the rest; Wheelnut’s summed it up for me. Nowadays we manufacture quality not quantity, and sell skills more than finished products.
If you make you have a commidity to sell… hard work but you get a return
If you trade you buy a commidity for a price and sell it higher… nice profit no work
Britain has always been a trading nation, but we always made stuff as well, just something to fall back on
Now we dont (or very little) and we rely on trading… trouble is the people making and buying stuff are not fools and can see the saving by cutting out the middle man (the trader - us as a nation)
We as a nation are relying on selling on bits of paper , or bytes on a computer… we produce very little tangiable products.
That is what is killing us and if an idiot like me can see it why cant the university degre guys see it? oh yes that is becuase they are all getting paid a lot of money to shuffle papers rrather than move goods
gnasty gnome:
Cars. Nissan. Honda. Toyota. BMW & TATA. Hmm, OK it may be UK workers but the companies are not British. I cannot afford a Caterham, Westfield, or Morgan.
But for the cars that are built here, there’s a huge UK based supply chain feeding components, consumables, support into the factories. It’s reckoned (with Nissan Washington) that for every person employed in the factory, there’s another 5 indirectly employed in local companies.
Chemicals. Greenpeace have almost put a stop to that, they would prefer us to buy chemicals from Eastern Europe or China and risk them being contaminated with something.
Teesside chemical works still going strong on Seal Sands and Wilton site. Wilton has a big BioMass plant now, and guess where the woodchip is coming from? Well it comes into Teesport on boats so I’m guessing it’s not local
State of the Art HiFi equipment from BUSH or Kenwood or HK, Panasonic, Sony and Sanyo. Although I would buy Wharfedale speakers if they still made them in the UK
I’m guessing Phillips, Sharp and Goodmans don’t cut it
I do own a pair of English Loakes boots and a pair of English Church shoes
Good lad.
If you make you have a commidity to sell… hard work but you get a return
If you trade you buy a commidity for a price and sell it higher… nice profit no work
Britain has always been a trading nation, but we always made stuff as well, just something to fall back on
Now we dont (or very little) and we rely on trading… trouble is the people making and buying stuff are not fools and can see the saving by cutting out the middle man (the trader - us as a nation)
We as a nation are relying on selling on bits of paper , or bytes on a computer… we produce very little tangiable products.
That is what is killing us and if an idiot like me can see it why cant the university degre guys see it? oh yes that is becuase they are all getting paid a lot of money to shuffle papers rrather than move goods
Look on the bright side side we’ll soon be importing even more bicycles from China to ride on Cameron’s privatised road network while we send Rolls Royces and Range Rovers back to the Chinese Communist Party faithful as payment.
