{"id":2969,"date":"2013-07-21T09:20:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T09:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=2969"},"modified":"2013-07-21T09:20:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-21T09:20:20","slug":"dont-write-off-british-manufacturing-and-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=2969","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Write Off British Manufacturing and Engineering …"},"content":{"rendered":"

It sometimes seems fashionable to put down British manufacturing and engineering such as when the well known idiot Jeremy Clarkson<\/a>\u00a0announced: “We don’t manufacture anything any more”.<\/p>\n

Whilst it is true that Britain no longer makes more goods than the rest of the world combined, if you take the trouble to look you will find a surprisingly big industry. The trouble is that we all too often look backwards and compare today with the 19th century. Time to stop doing that, and actually\u00a0look<\/em> at today’s industry.<\/p>\n

To quote the Wikipedia article<\/a> (which has some other quite dated figures): “manufacturing output has increased in 35 of the 50 years between 1958 and 2007” and “output in 2007 was at record levels, approximately double that in 1958”. And: “In 2008, the UK was the sixth-largest manufacturer in the world measured by value of output.”<\/p>\n

We may not make as\u00a0much<\/em> stuff as we used to, but what we do make is a\u00a0lot<\/em> more valuable.<\/p>\n

A few points that illustrate just how well Britain is doing :-<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Of 11 constructors within Formula-1, 8 are based in the UK. Including teams such as Mercedes which you would quite reasonably assume were based in another country.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Despite a series of governments that believe that spending money on space is a waste of time, the UK space industry is still worth \u00a39 billion a year.<\/li>\n
  3. BAE Systems<\/a> is the third largest defence company in the world.<\/li>\n
  4. GlaxoSmithKline<\/a> is the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world.<\/li>\n
  5. Of the 100 companies in the FTSE-100, around 33 can be regarded as manufacturing companies of one kind or another.<\/li>\n
  6. A lesser known company (ARM<\/a>) designs what is probably the most successful family of computer processors ever – ARM-based processors are found in 95% of all smartphones.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It sometimes seems fashionable to put down British manufacturing and engineering such as when the well known idiot Jeremy Clarkson\u00a0announced: “We don’t manufacture anything any more”. Whilst it is true that Britain no longer makes more goods than the rest of the world combined, if you take the trouble to look you will find a […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-7-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-LT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2969"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2971,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969\/revisions\/2971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}