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Are you conVINCEd?


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He's the only one of the three, who can afford to tell us the truth, precisely because he's not going to get the job! The other two were arguing over fictitious efficiency savings - to either save cutting services or provide phantom tax cuts. With a majority of electors being in denial, believing a few efficiency savings will pull us out of the mire - both Alister and George just can't bring themselves to tell it "like it is" and frighten off the voters! :wink: The Country's bankrupt; we have no industry to speak of and no longer produce anything tangible; and now our dependence on the financial services sector located around the Alice in Wonderland world of Canary Wharf has collapsed - the ship's sinking, and they're arguing about arranging the deck chairs! :roll:

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we have no industry to speak of and no longer produce anything tangible

 

according to figures I have read, the UK is still the worlds fifth largest manufacturer with an output of 2.7 trillion dollars; just behind France which has an output of 2.9 trillion dollars with a similar sized population so why do you assume we no longer produce or manufacture anything?

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we have no industry to speak of and no longer produce anything tangible

 

according to figures I have read, the UK is still the worlds fifth largest manufacturer with an output of 2.7 trillion dollars; just behind France which has an output of 2.9 trillion dollars with a similar sized population so why do you assume we no longer produce or manufacture anything?

 

WHAT do we produce??????

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BAZ, take the blinkers off, and have a good look round Warrington - at all the factories that no longer exist - and it's the same throughout the rest of the country. Factories provided employment for the dross that left school without any qualifications; gave them a wage and self respect, and kept them out of trouble. Oh there's warehousing and other menial service jobs, if they've not been taken by migrants - that's about it. Sadly life today is , young men with no hope, living off scams on the Chatsworth Estate. Try a spot of shopping and look at the labels on the packaging - made in China, India - anywhere bar Britain - says it all. :roll: Such are the joys of liberal free market capitalism. :twisted:

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Obs..... what kind of a half baked argument is that? We never built a whole Concorde in the UK as parts were made in factories all over Europe....

 

We still build millions of cars in the UK although most are built by foreign owners in UK factories. Not everything is made abroad and according to sources, 3539 Manufacturing Companies are still located in the UK and UK manufacturing has grown at its fastest rate recently for 15 years...... so stop being such a doom and gloom merchant! :D

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Obs..... what kind of a half baked argument is that? We never built a whole Concorde in the UK as parts were made in factories all over Europe....

 

We still build millions of cars in the UK although most are built by foreign owners in UK factories. Not everything is made abroad and according to sources, 3539 Manufacturing Companies are still located in the UK and UK manufacturing has grown at its fastest rate recently for 15 years...... so stop being such a doom and gloom merchant! :D

 

Producing what????? And how many were there 20 years ago?

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Can't go back that far but in Jan 2000 we produced about 146,000 cars, in Jan 2010 we produced about 101,000. Interestingly in Jan 2009 the figure was about 61,000.

 

in the year 2000 we produced about 1.65 million cars of which 1.1 million were for export. in 2006 the figure was down to 1.45 million but the exports were still around the 1.1 million cars

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Well Baz, you of all people, talking like a politician and quoting stats! The car industry is highly automated, so not exactly likely to employ the bulk of young school leavers - FACT: one in five of our workforce are now economically inactive: FACT: the major share of our economy is now devoted to the finance and service sector - just look around this Town at all the industries/factories that actually made things (view the topic in the history section), that are no more - I rest my case! Kyje, you have a point (strange point coming from a liberal though!), we do have an active arms industry (again highly automated); this allows third world countries to buy arms from us with the money we give them in overseas aid, so they can bomb the s**t out of each other or sell the arms on to insurgents, terrorists or Somali pirates! :roll:

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I'll leave the politician bit to you Obs!! Yes they were stats, but as correct as the office of national statistics are told to produce them by Gordon of course!

 

Things move on, you can't have thousands of people making cars because it isn't financially viable anymore, people want to earn too much for a start. Even back in the 60's though, car production was still highly automated.... I have films of Corsairs being produced at Halewood and Dagenham and there aren't that many people in the videos even then

 

The biggest problem we have here with manufacturing is the Government not putting presure on companies to stop them taking jobs abroad to India and the like, there must be some barriers they could erect to deter the trend, especially when the capitailst society breeds the cheap labour, but since Labours minimum wage, all the low paid jobs that people had two or three of to make ends meet have all gone and the low paid workers condemed to the dole queue.....

 

it is a real catch 22, the Unions argue for the minimum wage, the government brings one in, the companies lay off all the lower paid staff and ship the jobs abroad but the government does nothing to stop them!!

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I wasn't arguing that "thousands of people" should be making cars, quite the contrary; but that most if not all, should be making something - which self evidently isn't the case. Our industrial base was lost under Thatcher, who, instead of modernising it with automation, allowed it to fail and decay in favour of cheap foreign imports (mainly from Japan at the time). We now have an energy crisis looming, and we're sat on a thousand year supply of coal - but next to no pits. She embraced the city and the finacial and service sector as our future (and we now know where that has led us),. a legacy repeated by Bliar - hence the decay and deriliction that can be seen in the loss of our dark satanic mills. The irony in all this of course, is that a socialist ideal of economic equality is being delivered by the system they scorned - capitalism; for, as it ventures ever further to exploit cheap labour markets, it raises the living standards of the third world at the expense of the developed one. A catch 22 indeed for future UK generations. :?

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Indeed, because unless people wake up and realise that things like the minimum wage are responsible for us losing even more jobs abroad..... even more jobs will go abroad!

 

No good moaning about wage levels if there are no jobs to earn wages from!

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A sound thought Baz, if your a boss or a banker - and there's no racism or nationalism with the rich, they'll exploit anyone! It all depends on one's self interest: in the days of Empire and the class system, British workers could happily believe they were above in the pecking order, folk in the third world; when we imported raw materials and converted them into man made products for export - a perfectly reciprocal arrangement that we enjoyed with our Commonwealth - up to joining the EU. However, free trade is a two edged sword, and has allowed "the rich" to move to, and exploit cheaper labour markets. Thus, workers throughout the developed world, in the face of competition, face a downward spiral in living standards and wages. Now, to Kyje and Co, that may be a liberal dream come true; but I have to ask some questions about the need for "free trade" in the first place. The origins of "trade" were the exchange of goods available or produced in one's own land, for those not available locally; hence our export of manufactured goods in exchange for raw materials - and presuming we could produce most of the products we require locally, the need for imports and exports would be minimal, and thus our growing dependency on foreign imports minimised. :?

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