Having a Tory Government again....

[Pappa]

...Thatcher did a good job of raising England's economy out of the mud of decades of socialism through specific, well targeted economic policies...

Are you kidding? By laying waste to manufacturing in favour of the service and financial sectors, she was responsible for setting in motion the very 'unbalance' in the economy that even the torywhigs now admit needs 're-balancing' (though they have offered sod-all ideas of how they're going to make that happen).

Reminds me of something I wrote in May last year...

I'm sure it's not just me who's noticed this, but it's been bugging me greatly lately:

Maggie and every PM since, has said we can no longer support ourselves as a manufacturing economy. We must rely on other countries for that, where labour is cheaper. We've become a service economy, supporting ourselves mostly on call centres (or at least we were in the 90s).

Anyway, ignore for a moment the fact that they all had this blinkered idea that manufacturing was about steelworks and other very heavy industry (they all seemed to have a blindspot for the kind of value-added, hi-technology industry that countries like Germany do so well)....

All this became the central dogma, spouted by every PM and chancellor since Maggie (and almost always by their shadows on the other side of the Commons too).

All of a sudden, in the run-up to this general election, all the parties seem to be talking up industry again.... saying we need to bolster our hi-tech industry, develop a green-tech economy, etc.

Why the sudden turn-around? Is this just pre-election propaganda, aimed at the patriotic vote, or do they really believe we can have a technology/industry base for our economy again? If it's honest, why didn't they say so before.... any time over the past 20 years?

[Warren Dew]

Maggie and every PM since, has said we can no longer support ourselves as a manufacturing economy. We must rely on other countries for that, where labour is cheaper. We've become a service economy, supporting ourselves mostly on call centres (or at least we were in the 90s).

There was actually a big boom in the English software industry a couple decades ago. Granted under labor, a fair number of those folks fled to the U.S.

Anyway, ignore for a moment the fact that they all had this blinkered idea that manufacturing was about steelworks and other very heavy industry (they all seemed to have a blindspot for the kind of value-added, hi-technology industry that countries like Germany do so well)....

The Germans do it well, and the Japanese aren't bad at it, but the U.S. doesn't seem to get it, and I've never heard of the Brits doing it either. Not sure what's going on there, but transitioning to that kind of manufacturing would still have been a transition.