Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
If we are talking about twaddle then your post must take the biscuit.
The destruction of British manufacturaing took hold when we started to export jobs abroad.
A local firm which you may have heard of Howard and Bulloughs were a great engineering firm employing many men and women in our small town........they started selling the machinery abroad...machinery which would make goods that we had previously made in the Uk....and making them cheaper, because the employment costs in the countries these machines sold to, was lower that the costs here in the UK...making their goods cheaper than ours.
We were penalised for importing goods from abroad, but were being told that exporting was good...yes the exporting of ready made products would have been good, but the export of Machinery to make those product was not so good...but it was backed by The Queens Award to Industry(Export).
This was first awarded in 1966...long before Margaret Thatcher came into power.
Once these jobs were gone they were gone for good. Never to return.
Tea towels(and a multitude of other woven cotton goods) that used to be made in Lancashire came into the country from Portugal...at a cost that we could not dream of making them for....and thus our industry declined.
The motor industry went in much the same way.
It is no damn good training apprentices if there is no industry to train them in...and no jobs for them to do.
And please do not get me started Ont eh benefits culture...I just do NOT want to go there!!!!!
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Our friend from the north (I use the term very loosely Margaret) also forgets to mention the part the trade unions played in the destruction of our industry, "one out all out brothers" in the sixties we had one the finest car making industries in the world, but when the plants were shut down time after time, and cars weren't being delivered companies moved their plants to countries who appreciated the jobs and work they brought. No bigger example of a Union Shyster is good old Arthur Scargill who only the other week lost an High Court Action against the NUM which involved keeping in the lifestyle he'd become accustomed to, and it certainly wasn't the lifestyle of coal pit face worker, I'll always remember the secretary of the TUC say about Scargill, he went into the miners strike with a big union and a little house and came out the other side with a large house and a little union, now that is two faced hypocrisy in the first order