so, you want to include italian, french and german companies that make engines but we should discount uk companies that do the same?



this makes your claim of entirely without merit.

sorry for the edit. there's some brilliant stats in there that you now think is the gospel.

Nationalised industries are OK provided they are cost neutral - otherwise they are being effectively subsidised by the non-state run businesses. Some areas need to be nationalised - NHS, roads, railway tracks etc. No one could possibly argue that BT is a worse company now than it was then it is a great example of progress that can made through de-nationalisation.

One thing that has occured to me is why didn't the NUM offer to take the mines out of public ownership and run it themselves if the business was such a great proposition? If as MR Fish says the coal was of such burning efficiency then everyone should be desperate to buy it - especially outside of teh UK - as it would provide massive financial gains.

We may have high interest rates but we never had high inflation - the Tories brought inflation down to 2% from 18%. The high inflation rate was caused primarily by unions involved with nationalised industries demanding excessive wage rises which caused an unsustainable upward cycle and the need to bail out to the IMF.

Dean was the boss of the union - don't blame the monkeys because the organ grinder was unable to control/manage the underlings. She is an example, the major culprits were Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, Arthur Scargill, Ray Buckton, Sid Weighell who demanded higher wages with no increases in productivity and no process improvements forcing costs up.

You appear to have mistaken amused contempt for indignation.

Now run along - the adults are talking.

Boy, did you ever fall for the propaganda.

What's amazing in the aftermath of the Thatcher government is that the Old Etonians have taken control again as though she never existed and yet they use her memory to oppress the plebs much more than they were pre-Thatcher. Shows the "Establishment" is much more adaptive and intelligent than the leaders of the Labour "movement".

This is partially true (though some of the changes that Thatcher made cannot be undone). It's a very sad state of affairs too.

For adaptive and intelligent substitute devious and lying.

marrying a millionaire helped

You are not making any sense. Rolls Royce doesn't have comparable competitors in Germany, France and Italy making aero engines in terms of the value they add to manufacturing economy. Therefore in order for these countries to be ahead of ours on output they have to get it from other sources of manufacturing. And you have to have your head buried deep in the sand not to see this is plainly true given they are, as I pointed out, much stronger in other areas such as rolling stock manufacture.



No it shows you don't know what the term "gross value added" means.

It is a measure of revenue that takes into account subsidies and wages. It is NOT a measure of actual physical output. That is why this:

"(Britain is) 9th in terms of manufacturing output (value added) at $231 billion, behind the USA, China, Japan, Germany, Italy and France."

Doesn't contradict what you quoted which was this:

"108th in terms of manufacturing output as a share of gross value added (11%), marginally ahead of France but behind most major developed countries."

Because they are different statistics. In terms of output we ARE behind Germany, Italy and France because that is what the first one of those two stats tells you.

BBC R1 pull the song.

Wrong decision. It's there on merit, whatever your view on Mrs T. The great Lady herself would not have agreed with this decision.

the value you add is the value you add. that's it. why are you insisting on cherry picking what should and shouldn't be included. so what if we don't manufacture as much rolling stock as them?

this statement is clearly crap.

in fact, the only thing your stats show, is how the labour party destroyed british industry.

I am sure you understood the meaning. BMW and VW are German owned companies and so any outposts here such as Mini are always at risk of losing out to German domestic concerns. The state of Lower Saxony owns something like 12% of VW and despite the "Volkswagon Law" being declared illegal the share ownership structure is such it isn't going to be taken over by a foreign company or dismantled.

In France Renault (which is associated with Nissan) was built up by the French government rather than allowed to go bust as our domestically owned car manufacturing base was. Companies like VW and Renault are German and French in an economic sense far more than any company in the UK involved in large scale volume manufacture is British these days.

So while companies like Nissan and Toyota contribute to our manufacturing output the fact they are foreign owned can't be shrugged off as just merely the product of globalisation because countries such as France, Germany (and Italy with Fiat) view the domestic ownership of such industries as important pillars of their economies.

but here's the thing, this thread has several posts about how thatcher destroyed uk industry. yet you link to a piece that proves otherwise.
in 1970, we were ranked 5th, by 1980 down to 7th yet by 1990 up to 6th and by 2000, 5th and now we're 9th. there's only one party who's destroyed british industry. and it certainly wasn't thatcher.

then there's manufacturing as a % of world total.

1979 3.9%
1990 4.3%
as you can see, the bitch killed it stone dead.

1997 4.3%
2010 2.3%

whereas new labour worked wonders.

why do people keep peddling the lie she destroyed british industry?