New Ways for Indigenous Manufacturing

Recent crises increase the need for economic/cultural rebalance If the economy is to be rebalanced in favour of the manufacturing sector, it is vital that the country’s best brains and slickest operators are attracted into that sector if it is to challenge the competition of industrial nations around the world. Although a contraction in the financial sector would theoretically release more of the best brains into manufacturing, this is by no means a foregone conclusion in the light of the prevailing national and industrial cultures revealed in the previous chapters. Government inspired encouragement is thus needed. While the cultures of the literary, educational, media and political establishments continue to look down on manufacturing careers, the need for cultural change is ever more pressing. In the 2011 MacTaggart lecture presented in Edinburgh, one of Google’s top executives Eric Schmidt has offered one approach to a solution, by the abandoning the limited choice of ‘luvvy or boffin’ attitude to educational fulfilment apparent in the views of opinion-leaders. Schmidt stresses the point by recalling some great entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution who were capable of being both engineers and poets at the same time. The Confederation of British Industries recently called for stronger Government and City support for medium sized companies, struggling to secure credit from banks, which it was thought could boost the economy by £50bn/year within the next decade. This could emulate the German Mitellstand, in which firms of between £10m and £100m capital accounted for 1% of businesses but created 22% of jobs. Recent governments have focussed on start-up companies while firms employing between 50 and 500 people have largely been ignored. The CBI Director General argued that such companies need access to new kinds of finance such as that which would be available by opening the bond market to this size of firm. Such firms represent 30% of the UK’s manufacturing base, he says. Reconnecting politicians with industrial endeavour Since the end of the British Industrial Revolution native industry has lacked the support of politicians from both left and right at both national and local level. To the trade unions, industrial owners had been the enemy. Historically, the Labour Party, political arm of the trade unions as well as the mouthpiece of the intellectual left, were hostile to industrialists on the grounds of past exploitation of human labour, the threat to both the British rural idyll and the pursuit of a social utopia. National politicians of the left were usually keen to extract the highest possible employer-contributions to National Insurance. At local government level, politicians of the far left saw industry as an institution to ‘milk’ for the highest possible level of taxation on industry, relative to the rates applying to residential property. This was the way to ‘milk’ the old enemy. To the far right national politicians of a rural persuasion originally saw industry as the enemy of the land-owning, rent-seeking and agricultural interest, again supporting the raising of employer-contribution to National Insurance. At local level there was similarly little opposition by the right to the imposition of high industrial rates. There was also encouragement from urban land-owners to milk industry for ground rents, a course that later seemed to be followed by the science parks founded by the colleges of the ancient universities. The recent changes towards a positive approach to industry by some Conservative and most Labour leaders need nurturing by all concerned, alongside a batch of other measures to enhance the growth of existing UK manufacturing concerns.