Verity Davidge, director of policy at Make UK, said: “There is no getting away from the fact that it’s deeply disappointing to see the UK drop out of the world’s top ten manufacturing nations for the first time. However, this isn’t a reflection of any decline in UK industry but of specific factors and trends that are redrawing the contours of the global economy.”
It’s not that manufacturing is declining in the UK. Output is still within a few percentage points of all time highs. Double what it was when Maggie came to power.
It’s that it’s growing more elsewhere. Which is fine – as other places get rich for the first time in history then they’ll be manufacturing more. Shrug.
It is also a question of what we are making :
Ships ?
Big diesel engines ?
Widgets ?
Candles that smell of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lady parts ?
In this day and age, with infustrialisation truly global and not just confined to North America, Jaoan and Europe, it is not just the raw fugures but what is being produced where, that needs to be analysed.
You don’t meet a lot of girls called “Verity” nowadays. I’m not sure I’ve ever met one.
Nor can I remember meeting a “Davidge”. She isn’t an AI thingie, is she?
Manufacturing requires electricity.
Expensive energy* leads to manufacturing fecking off to a country with saner policies (so not Germany). Verity means enduring truth, you’d think she’d have cottoned on.
I work in industrial property. In my direct experience over the past five years energy prices have forced several times more well-established small manufacturers out of business than Covid.
@PiP
Then you haven’t met my niece! And probably not her sister Prudence.
Otto – there’s only one item on your list that you can’t find on eBay!
“probably not her sister Prudence.”
I have met a “Pru” which more likely stood for Prudence than Prune.
John – Expensive energy* leads to manufacturing fecking off to a country with saner policies (so not Germany).
Yarp. The article mentions Germany as a place we should copy, because they have a “long-term manufacturing strategy”.
But Hitler also had a strategy, and that was a complete disaster too. Germany is being rapidly deindustrialised now, faster than the RAF deindustrialised them in the early 1940’s:
S&P Global said today its eurozone manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI), a rough real-time proxy for activity in the sector, fell this month, as the sector dived deeper into contraction in both Germany and France.
The eurozone manufacturing PMI fell to 45.6, a seven-month low, from 45.8, disappointing expectations for a modest increase to 46.0. In Germany the indicator came in at 42.6, a three-month low, while in France it fell for a second straight month to 44.1. Anything under 50 is contractionary territory.
This isn’t a temporary problem, it’s a mortal wound and they’re bleeding out jobs and factories every week:
European industry — and Germany first and foremost — was battered by the surge in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The bloc rode out the immediate emergency better than expected, finding alternatives to Russian gas, for example, through imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas.
But the hope that European industry would swiftly recover has faded, even as the eurozone economy in the aggregate returns to growth.
Eurostat’s industrial production index for the eurozone remains below its 2021 level, and is trending lower. And policymakers are starting to realize that the turnaround they had expected is not materializing.
They’ve killed the Golden Goose. There’s no future for manufacturing in a Net Zero economy.
But don’t worry! Europe’s dopiest cows are on the case:
The newly re-elected chief of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, put restoring competitiveness front and center in her political priorities for her next mandate, while European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said last week that Europe’s competitive position vis-à-vis China is set to have a growing influence on the Bank’s thinking.
The EU’s idea of making Europe “competitive” involves massive tariffs, which will be reciprocated by China. We’ll all get RICH by charging ourselves import taxes.
Comments are closed.