We are already propping up the private sector, service industries through tax credits and other subsidies. So because the employer of a shelf-stacker refuses to pay a living wage, the tax-payers of this country have to subsidise his/her wages through tax credits. All the time the shelf-stacker's employer is paying himself huge bonuses and shareholder dividends.

Care to suggest an alternative?

I worked in the textile industry in the 70's. While the cheap labour argument has weight (Although the British textile industry seems to have encouraged Asian workers to come over and work cheaply just as the industry collapsed!) it's not the only factor. In 1975 we worked on Looms that were built in 1904. Foreign competition worked on new looms that were up to 10 times as fast; British industry had not invested in new machinery in over 70 years and apparently had no intention of doing so. I suspect this might have applied to some other sectors. Most of our skilled workers ended up on Asda checkouts.

A very important point. We seem to have dismal management in both private and public sectors for a long time – particularly in terms of investment and infrastructure.

Of course you shouldn't be pigeonholed with her based purely on your colour, class or indeed accent. But there are many that would do exactly that. Not sure on your self-definition of WWC purely based on the fact that you work as you do know what kind of people the original report is referring to.

Like you, I too am not particularly fond of labels or people who instantly label. I blame both ends of the political spectrum for this though. Each can be as bad as the other.

I think you have touched upon one of the big mistakes of the 1950's.
Post-war, countries like Germany had to rebuild and they did so using the latest technology (not just out of foresight, they were buying new). Many other countries followed suit and reduced their unit costs in the process.
In the UK, however, there were government initiatives to bring in cheap labour from the former colonies ... and manufacturers allowed themselves to believe that would solve their unit cost issues.
In the very short-term it did.
Long term however, it merely exacerbated the situation and increased the size of the pool of de-skilled unemployed labour.

In the 1980's I visited an ICI fibre factory in Germany many times, which was consistently out-performing against its UK counterparts, largely because it had better machinery.
When it came to getting more investment, the better-performing plants got the re-investment, which was of course, the German plant. The UK plants were seen as under-performing ... when really they could have been just as good if not better.

Or actually, good decision making in that resources were shifted to areas of the economy that generated more wealth than a mature, simple industry that could be replicated in many countries around the world. If we'd stuck with textiles, coal mining, etc, etc we'd now have living standards equivalent to a developing nation.

Yes dear. That's right.



Building a sewerage system and then simply leaving it for 100 years was a good shift of resources, for instance.

If you care to look it up, you'll find that the major coal mining countries are also the major coal-consuming countries, these countries have a better security of supply than we do.
They include such "developing" nations as the USA, Australia and Germany.
Coal mining was virtually wiped-out in the UK, not for economic reasons but rather to fit Thatcher's idealogy.

Even in the reduced area of textiles, the best in the world are quality English, Italian and Swiss fabrics.

I guess you'll be telling us next that we don't make decent cars any more because the British workforce is crap?

Going back to the textile industry, it's decline really set in the 1930s when the USA's rextile industry out-competed it. It was in terminal decline thereafter.

Precisely, we earn more from higher value, niche products. We would be poor if all we did was concentrate on old, labour intensive, low value added productivity.

Same with the railways, funnily enough there was enough private capital around when they were built to fund them, now when we need a railway built to help the economy it has to be built using taxpayers money.

Same old capitalism, privatise the profits and nationalise the debts.

... and your statement that if we still mined coal and made textiles we would be little better than a "developing economy" is therefore absolute bloody tripe.

I am afraid not. If we had mass employment in cheap textiles, coal mining and other such industries, we'd be alot poorer.