David Craig, on October 19th, 2022Wednesday/ Thursday blog
Another manufacturer forced out of Britain
Hopefully you’ll all have seen the wonderful news. BMW’s joint venture with Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, manufacturers of the Mini, have decided to move all production of electric mini cars from their Oxford factory to Germany and China with most production being (I believe) in China. This is great as the Oxford plant will make many fewer cars in future and so will end up using a lot less energy thus helping Britain reach its net zero targets.
Why would the BMW/Chinese joint venture want to manufacture in China rather than the UK? Obviously labour costs in China are much lower than in the UK. Moreover, Chinese workers don’t ever go on strike. Not if they want to avoid 20 to 30 years in a Chinese labour camp. But there’s a third element – energy costs in China are vastly lower than in the UK. When I wrote THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, UK energy costs were at least four times those in China:
Now I suspect that UK energy prices with all or expensive, unreliable supposed renewables are about ten times higher than those in China with all its wonderful cheap coal:
Though one oddity about the BMW decision is moving some production to Germany with its high labour costs and eye-wateringly high energy costs. But BMW is a German company and is probably under a lot of political pressure to base some electric car production in the Vaterland.
We don’t want no dirty factories
Helped by the (IMHO) utterly, worthless, parasitic, self-serving Ed Miliband’s economically-suicidal Climate Change Act, the UK is doing a wonderful job of reducing its CO2 emissions by exporting manufacturing jobs to countries with much lower energy costs:
Here’s a chart showing the UK’s share of global manufacturing since 1990 – almost halving from over 16% to around 8.7% in just 30 years:
And here’s one showing the decline in the UK’s manufacturing workforce from over 6 million in 1978 to just over 2 million now:
Hooray! Less manufacturing means lower CO2 emissions. And if we can completely wreck what pathetically little is left of UK manufacturing in the next few years, that will help us to achieve what we all want – net zero CO2 emissions.
Of course, there is just one small niggling downside to Britain’s self-inflicted, economically-suicidal de-industrialisation – a country which makes nothing and sells nothing can’t afford to pay for all the free goodies that the Brits now expect from their government.
But nobody seems to understand that. I guess they don’t teach economics in schools and universities anymore. Certainly, none of our pointless, over-paid, over-pensioned, self-serving, expenses-fiddling, intellectually-challenged politicians nor the climate-catastrophist mainstream media seem to have a clue about the economic and social disaster they are imposing on us with their net-zero idiocies.
It will be interesting to see how people react when they finally come to realise this unfortunate fact of economics.
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I think they are all too aware of the consequences of met zero.
But after the globalist coup ousting Truss we are headed back to Europe with the Euro as our currency. The UK is going to be made to suffer for daring to seek a path of liberty.
Sadly the electorate are turning to Labour which is simply more of the same effectively turkeys voting for Christmas. I think the powers behind the Truss coup will be very happy about that. May be good idea to buy a generator!
Those graphs are worth a thousand words but what would they tell us if they went back to the 19th Century. Isn’t this really about history and geography?
We should learn from history, but our politicians, bankers and corporate leaders think that they can ignore the lessons of history and control the impossible and create wealth from nothing. Geography is a different matter, and it sets limits on what we can do.
The Roman Empire is a classic example. They did not create wealth; they stole it from the countries they conquered. This gave the emperors a supply of wealth to grow the size of the state and support everybody they had encouraged to depend on it. When they stopped the expansion of the empire the money supply ended and the empire along with it.
England has been no better. Henry VIII ran out of money and robbed the monasteries. The navy robbed the Spanish treasure galleons and they had robbed Central Americans. Then we had the wealth from slavery and finally we robbed the empire. Creating wealth from our efforts seems to be a problem. However, the industrial revolution showed what can be achieved when geography is in our favour. We had iron, coal and the engineers to develop steam power. Eventually, other countries catch up and coming later they always have more modern factories. The UK wealthy businessmen got more attached to money, and they ignored modernisation.
WWII created a problem for the UK because factories had to be modernised and returned to peacetime production, but the socialists gained power. They decided that a welfare state was more important than a wealth generating state, unlike Germany which at that time did the opposite and became the dominant country in Europe, even after the destruction of the war.
Wars always result in new technology and WII brought electronics and a consumer society. The UK tried but the socialists wanted higher salaries, perhaps justified, but world trade of consumer goods increased, and costs matter. We priced ourselves out of jobs and the socialist expansion continued to result in a country that has an over-inflated sense of entitlement to live off the effort of others.
Now we do not have the materials for modern technology, and we have decided that coal, oil and gas should stay in the ground, so we have no reliable energy. We were the first to have a commercial nuclear power station but managed to turn that into a disaster. Zero carbon is what almost all politicians support and it seems a majority of the population. The result is a major river crossing closed for two days by two men with neither the government nor the police capable of doing anything about it. They have lost complete control of our borders and have no idea what to do about it. We have seen an increased use of food banks, sleeping on the streets and immigrants living in luxury hotels at our expense.
As you say the turkeys will vote for Christmas at the next election. What they should do is refuse to vote.
As for Paul, I think he will need bicycle power to generate electricity.
The bit that doesn’t compute for me is:
in order to achieve net zero we are sending our manufacturing to China. But that’s not reducing co2 production at all, it’s just been moved to the other side of the planet and it is still churning out the same co2 into the atmosphere. Meanwhile there is the co2 produced when China ships the product back to us.. So by outsourcing we are actually producing more co2 than we would have done if we’d kept it in house!
This very far from a “net zero” game. Allegedly we’ve reduced our emissions by over 25% so far but we haven’t at all, we’ve just sent the problem to the other side of the world. China can do it more cheaply because of cheaper energy and a cheaper workforce (I predicted in the 70s that the unions would strike themselves out of job!) but getting cheaper product is make the co2 “problem” worse not better.
It just doesn’t make sense to me. Or is this part of the emperor’s new clothes? We’re not supposed to spot the deliberate mistake. It’s certainly clear from the latest political shenanigans that they take us for fools.
I was very saddened when I read that Stefanie Wurst was
planning to move production of the electric mini to China.
When Volvo cars was sold to the Chinese 2009, I felt the same.
People in this country will buy Volvo and Mini and think
that they are buying into Swedish or British companies.
Jaguar cars…Indian owned…….Bentley and RR, German owned.
Does the UK still own Dinky toys cars?