David Craig, on December 9th, 2024Monday-Tuesday blog
Here’s a graphic of the ten top manufacturing countries in the world from the excellent Statista website:
Hopefully, you’ll notice that Britain is not on the list. In case you were wondering, the UK is at number 12, just below Brazil at number 11.
Manufacturing output in Britain has been in virtual freefall since at least 1990:
This has, of course, resulted in a massive loss of manufacturing jobs.
And now that our rulers’ ludicrous energy policies have given us some of the world’s highest energy prices:
We can expect a further acceleration of our country’s economically-suicidal de-industrialisation.
Hooray! We’re saving the planet
But it’s not all bad news. As our manufacturing has collapsed, our CO2 emissions have plummeted:
Because of the uber-lunatic way our governments measure CO2 emissions, anything made in Britain counts towards our country’s CO2 emissions. But anything made abroad and then imported into Britain doesn’t count. So the less stuff we make in Britain, the lower will be the country’s CO2 emissions and the faster will be our achievement of Net Zero. And, of course, we all want to win the supposed race to Net Zero in order to become “a clean energy superpower”.
Obviously we are deliberately committing economic suicide and impoverishing ourselves. But as we’re apparently saving the planet, we should feel a warm glow of self-satisfaction at our sacrificies for the survival of humanity in the face of the non-existent climate crisis:
Though that warm glow will be about the only warmth most of us will be able to enjoy if our crazed Net-Zero-obsessed elites have their way.
So, let’s all rejoice at the glorious future our rulers have planned for us:
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The decline in manufacturing started with the Labour government after the war. They neglected industry in favour of creating a welfare state which has dominated the economy ever since. Look how the car industry failed because of unreliable products and poor designs compared to the completion from Japan. Look also at the nuclear industry. When the Queen pulled the switch to open the first nuclear power station it was faked and we were told that nuclear generated electricity would be so cheap that there would be no need to meter it. I believe we only sold one Magnox reactor. Labour now seems set on more nationalisation.
I saw your TCW article comparing the UK and USA policies, but there is another important aspect. Britain started the industrial revolution because geography favoured us with the materials and we had the scientists and engineers to make something of them. Perhaps also the money from the Empire and the slave trade helped. Now we don’t have the materials for a modern economy and most people, not only the government, seem opposed to fracking. We cannot even produce enough food and Starmer is making this worse. I read that only two countries could be self sufficient, the USA and Russia, mainly because their size means that have most things. We have to import to survive and the only way we can afford imports is by getting money from exports. We have made ourselves uncompetitive because of high energy costs and high labour costs and the ever increasing size of the unproductive state sector. The politicians talk about growth without defining what they mean. It isn’t growth that is the issue; they need to focus on our basic needs for survival, and the idiots want a bigger population.