British Steel is on track to be fully nationalised within weeks, the Guardian understands, a year after the government took over the daily running of the loss-making business from its Chinese owner.
The steelmaker, which employs 3,500 people at its plant in Scunthorpe, was taken under government control last April amid fears that the owner Jingye was planning to shut down the site.
British Steel operates the last two remaining blast furnaces in the UK but it is still economically controlled by the Chinese company, which bought it out of insolvency in early 2020.
Sigh.
As I might have pointed out before, one of the problems with this state involvement in industry is that it never does mean forming the new at that bleeding edge of the white hot technological revolution but often does mean subsidising, preserving, the remnants of the losers of the last.
Yes, yes, lovely, preserve virgin steel capability, whaddabout the Royal Navy and all that. But blast furnaces, in rich countries, have already lost that technological race….
So whats your wonderful ‘free trade’ solution then? Just let strategic industries die, and wonder what to do when the SHTF? I mean its not as if the whats happening now isn’t a wake up call. Its pretty obvious that the ‘Hey we can get all the stuff we need from abroad while we sell each other ever increasingly expensive houses and lattes’ concept is being rather tested at the moment. And things haven’t even got all that hot yet. And equally its not exactly obvious that the ‘import everything’ concept is actually making us richer. In fact the opposite it seems, the more we close down our manufacturing and extractive industries the more the country gets poorer and poorer by the day. Its almost as if employing people to dig stuff out of the ground and manufacture stuff from raw materials is the very basis of human wealth. But hey what do I know, I’m just a farmer making something everyone needs every day to survive. I’m sure we can always import that from someone else.
“I mean its not as if the whats happening now isn’t a wake up call.”
How does what’s happening in the Straits of Hormuz affect the steel we need? It might be affecting the price of producing steel from wherever we buy it, but that would be the same problem if we produced it here.
“And equally its not exactly obvious that the ‘import everything’ concept is actually making us richer. In fact the opposite it seems, the more we close down our manufacturing and extractive industries the more the country gets poorer and poorer by the day.”
The two things have nothing to do with each other. Importing things has made us richer. A £100 Moto G phone would cost a lot more if made in the UK. Clothing would cost more. It’s the actions of the state making us poorer, wasting more and more money in the public sector, the massive pensions burden, the minimum wage, environmental costs.
“Its almost as if employing people to dig stuff out of the ground and manufacture stuff from raw materials is the very basis of human wealth”
Someone has to do it, but do you want to put together iPhones or design the chip that goes in it? Where do we have comparative advantage? Which earns more money? Who is going to be made poor by subsidising phone making to be competitive with the rest of the world?
We simply are not competitive at low value manufacturing with the rest of the world, or even most of Europe. And that’s not really something where the government caused it. It’s been happening since the 1980s. It has little to do with Thatcher or Blair. The world changed. You can run a remote factory in Asia like you couldn’t back then. There’s no putting the container and fibre optic communications back in the bottle. But all that stuff happening there, getting cheaper created new demands. More people work at Dyson in Malmesbury than did when they had a factory there. ARM are a huge business.
“ Importing things has made us richer.”
Why is the UK a shithole then? Why is it going down the pan economically? Why are all the countries doing well in the world the ones who dig stuff out of the ground or make stuff?
All the ‘lets import everything’ concept is doing is enabling the Big State. If stuff had to be made here the State would have to get out of the way to let it happen. Otherwise we’d be like Soviet Russia, with empty shop shelves and a 30 year waiting list for a Lada. Because we can import cheap sh*t from abroad the State can behave like a Soviet administration here, and get away with it by keeping the masses quiet with cheap crap. The one enables the other.
“Why is the UK a shithole then? Why is it going down the pan economically? Why are all the countries doing well in the world the ones who dig stuff out of the ground or make stuff?”
China has a higher GDP than the UK?
“All the ‘lets import everything’ concept is doing is enabling the Big State. If stuff had to be made here the State would have to get out of the way to let it happen.”
No it isn’t. That’s getting the state out of the way. What people want is cheap smartphones. Wanting them made here requires state intervention.
People may want cheap smart phones, unfortunately they can’t eat them, heat their homes with them, or drive them to work. Smart phones are ‘nice to have’ not a necessity of life. If the getting of the cheap smart phones means we adopt an economic model that f*cks up our ability to produce the necessities of life, eventually the UK will collapse, because at some point something is going to happen (it may be happening right now) that means we can’t get the necessities of life from abroad, or not enough of them for 70m people. Then you have a lot of cold hungry and very angry people.
Let them eat smart phones, as Marie Antoinette might say these days. Didn’t do her much good in 1793.
“If the getting of the cheap smart phones means we adopt an economic model that f*cks up our ability to produce the necessities of life, eventually the UK will collapse, because at some point something is going to happen (it may be happening right now) that means we can’t get the necessities of life from abroad, or not enough of them for 70m people. Then you have a lot of cold hungry and very angry people.”
How does it fuck up the ability to produce the necessities of life? Smartphones increase productivity. Anyone delivering food somewhere will do it better with the maps on there.
“How does it fuck up the ability to produce the necessities of life? Smartphones increase productivity. Anyone delivering food somewhere will do it better with the maps on there.”
Are you being purposely dumb? The globalisation economic model is what allows cheap smart phones. The ‘Produce everything wherever its cheapest regardless of all other factors’ economic model that we’ve been following for nigh on 30 years now. Which also means we have no primary extractive industries any more, we have less and less food production capacity (and what we have is only because up to 2019 we were part of the EU which meant the Uk was forced to subsidise UK food production – if the Uk had had its way farming would have gone the way of the mines and the ship building and the fishing and the steel and everything else that was sent abroad years ago. The UK government is currently engaged in destroying what’s left of UK food production by paying subsidies to NOT grow food), we have less and less capacity to produce the ‘must haves’. Yes we have the Lloyds insurance market, and very expensive lawyers in the City, and we code lots of computer games, and design computer chips, and all sorts of other ‘high value’ products. But none of them are what keep the lights on, bellies full or keep our enemies from the gate. For that you need primary industries and heavy engineering. When the SHTF the world does not clamour for another Call of Duty game, or a new ARM chip, it wants oil, gas, food, weapons, basic manufactures. We have none of these, so we are f*cked.
It looks quite plausible that Trump is about to walk away from the Strait of Hormuz.
The only way to open that Strait and get Iranian oil flowing is by sending destroyers to escort tankers.
The US doesn’t need or even use the oil that comes out of there, so (his argument may well end up being) why the fuck should the Yanks risk US destroyers and sailors to protect the ships bringing oil to Europe if Europe won’t risk destroyers and sailors to protect those ships?
But can we send destroyers?
Not really.
We have six destroyers, only one of which is currently operational.
Now, I know that we can’t build destroyers overnight, but there are lessons here, one of them being shit you need to fight wars is not amenable to the same market forces that dictate the availability of Mars Bars, because you don’t know what’s round the corner.
The ‘we can buy everything from overseas, haven’t you read Ricardo’ bollocks works fine when a) you’re in peacetime and b) when the Royal Navy controls the seas, but those conditions no longer prevail and we should have planned for this time and we should be planning for worse times.
“It looks quite plausible that Trump is about to walk away from the Strait of Hormuz.”
Who knows? He’s like a magic 8 ball with a different update every day on what’s happening.
“Now, I know that we can’t build destroyers overnight, but there are lessons here, one of them being shit you need to fight wars is not amenable to the same market forces that dictate the availability of Mars Bars, because you don’t know what’s round the corner.”
Why do we even want to build destroyers? What’s your endgame here? We send a load of forces to Iran and fight a war against 90 million people? Then what? Stay in the country as various Shias shoot the shit out of us until we decide this was a bad idea and leave, and ISIS, pro-Shah, IRGC and Al-Qaeda decide to come in and have a war over it, probably leaving some other bunch of cunts in charge. Let the cunts fight it out, buy oil from the cunts that win. They’re all cunts. The only reason no-one says that Saudi are cunts are because they’re our cunts.
If you want to have contingency for steel, what else? The machinery to make the steel? The fuel to transport steel? Go and write up a contingency plan for everything in the UK that we import and put a cost to it, and then factor in how much the politicians will fuck it up.
“The ‘we can buy everything from overseas, haven’t you read Ricardo’ bollocks works fine when a) you’re in peacetime and b) when the Royal Navy controls the seas, but those conditions no longer prevail and we should have planned for this time and we should be planning for worse times.”
This is peacetime. The UK military had 60 deaths last year. The price of oil is high, but it’s not even at a 5 year peak. What’s the annual budget you’re thinking of for the military to prevent the odd 6 month spike?
Why do we even maintain a navy (or an army or air force)?
So that when some Magic 8 Ball event happens, and the oil gets choked off, we can take part in the process of reopening the flow.
I thought I had explained this.
I don’t know what the next Magic 8 Ball event is, but there’s a decent chance destroyers will help.
Yes, it’s expensive, and like a building’s sprinkler system you hope to fuck you never really need it… but you are very glad it’s there if you do.
I completely agree re the Saudis, the government waste, and the general desirability in normal conditions of importing shit that’s better and cheaper than we can make it.
I disagree that this is peacetime – I think we’ve been at war for some time, just mostly overseas – but that’s in any case irrelevant.
The question is: will we always be at (as you decribe it) peace?
Why do you even put locks on your doors? What’s your endgame there?
This is akin to my asking you to ‘go and write up’ an economic and social plan for how we can throw literally everyone in the UK onto the dole and also find the money to import absolutely everything.
I don’t ask that because I’m pretty sure that’s not what you think.
Likewise, I don’t think we can make everything we need here – I just think we have the balance wrong and that we should have retained the capacity to make some of the absolute essentials, even though it would have cost us money, and stuff for war fighting is about as essential as it gets.
In Iraq, British soldiers were supplied with 9mm and 7.62mm rounds imported from India and Portugal. They were so bad for jams and misfires that thousands of rounds were just lobbed into the sea.
Why did we even need to make our own ammunition, when you can import it?
I understand the argument that it would be difficult to choose which, and that in a counterfactual world you would always have made mistakes. But we have made mistakes by not doing it (in my view).
“Why do we even maintain a navy (or an army or air force)?”
To protect Britain and her interests. Which are protecting the country from invasion (pretty much unlikely), the odd overseas territories and transport.
“So that when some Magic 8 Ball event happens, and the oil gets choked off, we can take part in the process of reopening the flow.
I thought I had explained this.
I don’t know what the next Magic 8 Ball event is, but there’s a decent chance destroyers will help.”
How many are you going to buy, at what cost, for what likely situation? Or do you want every contingency covered, and what’s your total plan for that? You can’t just say “destroyers” because the next emergency should be medicines or who knows what.
“This is akin to my asking you to ‘go and write up’ an economic and social plan for how we can throw literally everyone in the UK onto the dole and also find the money to import absolutely everything.”
Ask away, if you want. But the point is that if you’re going to have a load of shadow industries to protect the country it is going to cost money.
“Likewise, I don’t think we can make everything we need here – I just think we have the balance wrong and that we should have retained the capacity to make some of the absolute essentials, even though it would have cost us money, and stuff for war fighting is about as essential as it gets.”
But if you call tanks or aircraft essential, you have to have a contingency plan for everything required to make them, right down to the raw materials. If planes need CPUs, you either need to make them or to plan for a stockpile of CPUs for years in the event of war.
“In Iraq, British soldiers were supplied with 9mm and 7.62mm rounds imported from India and Portugal. They were so bad for jams and misfires that thousands of rounds were just lobbed into the sea.
Why did we even need to make our own ammunition, when you can import it?”
That’s not an importation issue, it’s a quality control one. Shit bullets could just as easily be made in Sunderland if the MoD don’t check them. Your phone made in China works because Apple or Samsung do the quality control.
Get to it, then.
I said you could ask. I didn’t say I’d do it.
Why no 5.56mm rounds? Or am I out of date?
Just the calibres that were involved. 9mm for pistols, 7.62mm for GPMG/LMG and some other weapons.
“The only way to open that Strait and get Iranian oil flowing is by sending destroyers to escort tankers.”
How does that work? The Iranians see the destroyers and think: “oo we now have two targets, we’ll run out of ammo?” Isn’t the function of a destroyer to destroy other shipping? Iran is not using ships to destroy tankers, it’s driving a nondescript lorry into a layby, pulling back the tarps, shooting, and driving off.
The Armchair Admirals are trying to fight WW1. Sending a convoy throgh the Strait just gives the Iranians more targets.
I am not privy to the workings of the naval mind, but it wouldn’t absolutely amaze me if actually it is part of the role to provoke exactly that – in the same way that infantry advance to contact, knowing that they’re going to get shot at, as a means of getting the enemy to expose his disposition.
Jason or some other naval bod will correct me if I’m wrong, but, no, the primary function of modern destroyers is not really to ‘destroy other shipping’, it is a defensive role designed to protect other assets (usually aircraft carriers) from attack by land, sea, or air.
Obviously, if enemy ships are involved then yes, that’s their gig. Submarines, aircraft, or land-based missiles or drones are also their gig.
Depends what you mean by ‘ships’. The US has generously given Iran’s Navy half of the ocean – the bottom half – but they’re quite likely to use suicide boats, and destroyers have armaments designed to deal with this threat which oil tankers don’t.
Edited to add: and yes, in respect of Iran’s land-based missile or drone threat to shipping, that’s precisely what destroyers, in concert with air assets, would be used for.
Think of it like this.
1) You accept Iran can close Hormuz and the world economy is fucked.
2) You say No, you can’t close Hormuz, and we’re coming through with these tankers, escorted by these destroyers, and overwatched by those big things with the domes and lots of jets. You know roughly when are where the missiles will be fired, and the further out they’re fired from the greater the chance of interdiction, so now the Iranians have a bit of thinking to do. They could have a pop with their trailer cruise missile system from some bushes 15-20km inland, though there’s a significant risk that their spotters will be wiped out because of their signals footprint, but as soon as they fire it (or them) they’re going to get lit up like Blackpool illuminations. I’m not saying it is guaranteed to succeed, but I am saying that option 1) is guaranteed to fail.
“Destroyer” used to be short for “torpedo boat destroyer”. It was a small ship built to block torpedo boats and their torpedoes from being used on a capital ship.
They also seem to be about the smallest ship that can pack a useful amount of stuff to shoot down missiles and drones (which are slow missiles with better terminal guidance).
Being small, they can be built relatively quickly and cheaply. Assuming you really want to of course.
And, to be blunt, they don’t have much crew so when you lose one you lose fewer people than losing a cruiser.
Is blast furnace steel a strategic industry though? I remember when NEDDY took over Clive Sinclair’s business in the 1970s strangling any development of new products forcing it to continue in the radio business. He had to effectively let the government bankrupt it before he could escape and start computer development.
We need cheap, locally sourced reliable energy and a bonfire of regulations. Economy fixed.
I thought the reasoning was that we wanted to have independant virgin steel making so we weren’t constrained by overseaes shit that happens. But we have to import the ore and the coke. So all this is actually doing is moving the dependency down the chain. Better to level the furnaces and use the land to store the virgin steel we can buy with the money we save…
We don’t need to import coking coal, there was a mine planned in Cumbria for exactly that but the current lot of idiots won’t let it start operating.
I can only assume that decision makes the UK wealthier.
You have to replicate the whole thing, from scratch. Whatever the “I Pencil” chain is for tanks and planes, you need every bit of it. Either manufacturing of things, or stockpiles of things. And you then have to trust the likes of Starmer and Boris to do that right.
Or, just stay out of wars. Avoid having enemies where we don’t need them. The only reason we used to have massive forces was the empire and before that, because we nicked places like Calais and Aquitaine. Remove the Empire and why do you bother going to war with Germany in 1939? Germany had no ambitions to own the UK. It’s shit land. They went after the places you could grow stuff like Ukraine and Czechoslovakia.
Yada.
It’s all very well us wanting to stay out of wars, but there are those who would very much like to go to war with us, such as religious maniacs trying to get nukes to bring about the End Of Days, who have just demonstrated their ability to get a ballistic missile as far as the Western edge of Europe.
“Ah, but with much reduced payload, and anyway one failed, and anyway the other was shot down” the cunts say. Yeah. You don’t need much payload simply to make SW1 radioactive with a dirty bomb, and we don’t have the means here to shoot the fuckers down.
And they’ll do it given the chance, because that’s their end game. Never mind ours.
Oh, please. “Iran could hit the UK” is the new version of “Iraq could hit the UK with their WMDs that they totally have”. Are Switzerland tooling up for a nuke to hit Zurich? These “maniacs” are just as interested in killing yodelling infidels, right? And that’s closer than London.
These are not religious maniacs. There never were countries run by religious maniacs. People just want land and power. That’s what Saudi and Iran are fighting over everywhere, it’s what Adolf wanted. It’s why we invaded all sorts of bits of Europe in the 14th century. Yeah, ISIS will talk about “liberating this land for Allah” but it’s about dosh. Like we invaded those nice sunny bits of Europe that grow vines, rather than bits of Norway. Plenty of crosses worn as that was done.
No-one is liberating land for Allah that is just desert without oil under it, unless they’re complete wackos, and you don’t get more than a few wackos in a country.
These are not religious maniacs. There never were countries run by religious maniacs.
That, sadly, WB, is where you’re dead wrong. Iran is run by a religious death cult whose goal is to bring about the End of Days and the return of the Mahdi. They say so, plainly and repeatedly.
They intend to succeed, and it’s clear that every aggressive and warlike move they’ve ever made, from their distributed organisation to refining uranium they don’t need to developing IRBMs and cheap drones in such quantity as to overwhelm conventional defences, and then peppering the Hormuz mountains with them, makes this absolutely clear. They have been shrewd and intelligent in their preparation and they may well yet have succeeded: it may indeed be too late to stop them.
They’re clever people trying to bring about the end of the world (Israel first). The world is full of nukes. It wouldn’t surprise me if their plan includes tricking everyone else into using theirs, too. They’re all martyrs going to heaven, remember: they intend to die doing this.
No economics was harmed in the making of this statement.
“That, sadly, WB, is where you’re dead wrong. Iran is run by a religious death cult whose goal is to bring about the End of Days and the return of the Mahdi. They say so, plainly and repeatedly.”
And all the people of Iran are fine with this, are they? They don’t want to replace the Ayatollahs with some non-nutters? Where’s the revolution like the one in 1979?
“They intend to succeed, and it’s clear that every aggressive and warlike move they’ve ever made, from their distributed organisation to refining uranium they don’t need to developing IRBMs and cheap drones in such quantity as to overwhelm conventional defences, and then peppering the Hormuz mountains with them, makes this absolutely clear.”
We have nuclear weapons, as does France and the USA. Are these death cults too? Sure, it might mean they’re a death cult. It also might mean they’re paranoid. Or it might mean they have plans to invade Saudi Arabia. There are plenty of non-nutter reasons for having lots of arms.
“They’re clever people trying to bring about the end of the world (Israel first). The world is full of nukes. It wouldn’t surprise me if their plan includes tricking everyone else into using theirs, too. They’re all martyrs going to heaven, remember: they intend to die doing this.”
If they’re all such martyrs, why aren’t millions of them doing suicide bombing? That will get you to heaven in no time.
Why do you think Iran believes in this death cult, but there are no European or South American death cults of 90 million? How did the Iranians manage this, but the rest of the world hasn’t? Does this death cult thing apply to other Islamic states and if not, why not?
And all the people of Iran are fine with this, are they? They don’t want to replace the Ayatollahs with some non-nutters? Where’s the revolution like the one in 1979?
Well, they had a go a couple of months ago but after 30,000 or so of them were killed within a few days they decided to wait until Trump turned up, as he said he would. Of course the brave ones are now dead, so it’s not surprising the rest are a bit more cautious.
We have nuclear weapons, as does France and the USA. Are these death cults too?
No, and you’re being a bit obtuse. At the moment Iran is the only country run by a death cult that wants to end the world. That’s what makes it different. You can negotiate with all the other nuclear states, even Little Rocket Man.
Does this death cult thing apply to other Islamic states and if not, why not?
There are death cult-y people in the other Islamic states but very few seem to be in positions of power and no-one – even the Pakis – has yet pushed the button. That doesn’t mean they never will, but first things first, eh? Let’s deal with the obvious ones.
Yeah, couple of million protestors out of a population of 90 million.
Who knows what the Iranian people want? Just because a few people are saying the regime is hated doesn’t mean it’s true.
You seem very sure about this, like many westerners who have never been to the Middle East or North Africa other than perhaps on holiday, but unfortunately you’re completely wrong.
Oh, and Cromwell.
Am I? Back when European wealth was mostly about land, we had Catholics and Protestants killing each other.
Since we shifted to industry being the wealth, there’s still lots of Catholics and Protestants, but they aren’t killing each other in Europe, are they? Either we all stopped being religious fanatics because reasons, or land stopped being worth fighting over.
The Gulf is overwhelmingly a land-based economy. You get rich in Iran or Saudi by controlling the land with oil under it. If you want to get richer, you invade the country next door, just like various European countries scrapped over land. Or a modern equivalent is drug gangs controlling their territory.
Which is more likely, considering the normal behaviours of human beings: 1) want to get richer or 2) mad death cult?
Yes, you are.
We all stopped being religious fanatics because of the Reformation, and because four hundred more years have passed since that Reformation. Prior to that we also had religious fanatics running countries and killing people over religion.
Not every religion has had a reformation. Some pride themselves on never having one.
You seem very absolutist in your views – very black and white, yes and no.
This question admits of shades of grey, I’m afraid.
So it doesn’t mean that every member of that religion is a ferocious adherent to the most literal interpretations of its scriptures, but if, say, a given religion is run by men, and enough of those men are armed, and prepared (indeed, even delighted) to kill and die for that religion, they can control countries, or what’s left of them after secular government goes west, and in some cases, and I’m sorry to tell you this, but they do.
They tell you they’re religious fanatics, and it’s the height of rudeness (and decadent soft western stupidity) to disbelieve them.
That doesn’t rule out vile scum running other countries for their own benefit, nor a mix of the two in any given territory, but I’m afraid it is true.
We do still have iron ore – it had become economically less attractive and is generally lower grade, but the economics are changing rapidly. Coke was just a choice.
I struggle with this issue because I am generally a believer in comparative advantage etc – I wouldn’t have been on this blog for 20 years if I were not.
But we are currently paying millions of people to sit around doing fuck all, and not all of them are morons.
We should cut state spending on stuff we don’t need, and apply some of it to stuff we probably do need.
I concede that know what, and when, is difficult, but that goes for both sides of this argument, and steel is something we will always use.
OK, we have coke and ore in the ground. But no-one’s mining it and no-one will get close to getting permission to do so because it might let the Goblins out, George Monbiot said so.
It’s probably much cheaper to ship in the smelted slabs (they weigh a lot less than their components) and store them. We’d save on building the generating and distribution infrastructure to use arc funraces. Save on the subsidies and the fruitless projects just to give the furnaces something to do. The environment would actually be tons better off.
A 1m tonne slab stockpile would be enough for several years and the overwhelming majority of uses for virgin steel are planned up the wazoo so less chance of someone deciding they want to build a Dreadnaught over the next 12 months. Cheap, stable, reliable, environmentally friendly. Ta da!!!!
Yes, that’s a political choice – pretty sure none of us here don’t agree with you that politicians are twats.
It’s all a political choice – spend hundreds of billions on benefits and you can no longer keep factories going with orders for steel and ships etc.
I wouldn’t be against us building up reserves of stuff in good times – steel being one, fuel another (China has supposedly got enough oil and fuel, stored up for a year) – but obviously these are choices that are hard to sell to an electorate whose handouts are being cut to pay for it.
Now the fuel is drying up, attitudes will change, but daddy’s home from work and spankings are incoming.
We’re a nation of children, basically.
ISTM the thrust of this discussion so far reveals, as Original Jim has pointed out, that Ricardian Competitive Advantage has enabled this country to stop manufacturing and drastically moved the nature of work from wealth-producing to extractive.
Couple this with generational turnover, safe, easy living and Progressivism, and Competitive Advantage has funded the very ideas, and people with them, that have proactivvely turned this country into a shithole.
This is a cultural problem. It’s only economic insofar as UK enshittification is the unexpected trade-off from globalisation.
“has enabled this country to stop manufacturing”
We haven’t stopped manufacturing. We make luxury clothes, JCBs and all sorts of specialist machinery, medical equipment and optics that people use. We do lots of high value, high margin manufacturing.
People think we don’t make anything because we don’t make a lot of consumer products now. We aren’t making socks and children’s toys. But we make lots of things that businesses use. No-one stops and thinks who makes parking meters, or replacement hips, or the robots that go into car factories.
Why would you want to make trainers instead of Northamptonshire brogues?
And that’s before we get into all the things that are parts of other people making things. There’s a company in Swindon that designs the power management for the iPhone. There’s another one that design custom ASICs for cars. They don’t make anything physical but most of the value is the design not the making.
WB, while your head’s in the sand your arse is in the air and Mr. Islamo-lanyard is priming to give it a good kicking. Just sayin’.
When’s the last time you worked in a factory?
In the 90s in Japan.
“We haven’t stopped manufacturing. We make luxury clothes, JCBs and all sorts of specialist machinery, medical equipment and optics that people use. We do lots of high value, high margin manufacturing.”
The vast majority of which is of zero use when you have no food, energy or medicines.
” There’s a company in Swindon that designs the power management for the iPhone. There’s another one that design custom ASICs for cars.”
Very useful when you’re cold, starving and in need of antibiotics.
…
I was half way through a rather brilliant observation when all my typing vanished from the screen – AGAIN!
Can this bollocks not be fixed PDQ?
C’mon, Dearieme. rip it back out of your brain (in Notepad), paste it in and let’s have it, please.
I’ve long ago learned to C/P long posts to Notepad ( or anything similar) *first* before pressing Send.
Simply because you never know the timers on any cookies/deep dark recesses of code that might have expired while you were typping/editing/( possibly spellchecking) your current Opus Magnus.
That is the thing they won’t ever admit.
If you need to preserve it (and keep it running so you have people who know how to use it constantly trained) then they should just admit that and that the cost needs to be eaten.
But they always try to hide it behind some lie about ‘path to profitability’.
It may be necessary to have this capability *in* the UK – its never gonna make money in the UK. It may be necessary to have the Army in the UK – the Army’s never gonna make money. In both cases it may be better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it and thus just pay the cost.
One of the things I’ve learned reading this blog, is about the importance of “value-add”.
As someone who does work in manufacturing, it’s easy to see the importance of doing stuff youself and keeping things ‘in-house’. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge gained by doing things for yourself.
Now my question is, if we outsource / send overseas all our “value-add”, so that foreigners and foreign interests gain all the benefits, what happens to us?
Yes, we gain the immediate boost of selling off all our key industries, but what happens to our children when everything in this country is owned by Chinese / Saudis / Canadian teachers? Are we seriously better off when most of our economy is about selling houses to each other? What happens when AI destroys a lot of the white collar jobs that exist in the post-industrial, service economy that the UK has become?
I’m not as well travelled as some on here, and I’m well aware that other countries have problems of their own, but when I see photos and videos of some of the Asian / Middle Eastern cities, they look a world apart compared to the borderline third-world look that most of the UK resembles today.
We can observe what is happening in West Germany, who are now in the process of transitioning from a first world, rich, solidly middle class industrial powerhouse, into something that resembles what the UK has become. Are they about to become better off by shedding 100’s of thousands of well paid jobs in highly successful industries?
At the end of the day, the economy should work to the benefit of the population of this country. Absolute economic efficiency isn’t the be all and end all of things.
“Absolute economic efficiency isn’t the be all and end all of things.”
Heretic! Getting widgets 10p cheaper from abroad is far more important according to the owner of this blog.
Not quite – the free market part says that it’s the buyers of widgets who get to make the decision.
Which means the buyer of the widgets gets the benefits, but society as a whole gets the detriments. The buyer of cheap Chinese crap gets the benefit of cheap Chinese crap, the rest of us have to pay extra taxes to fund the welfare payments for all those put out of work. Privatisation of benefits, socialisation of losses.
What a great system.