How To Fix 'The North'?

[Mike Barton]

It was the same with Filipino merchant seaman. Ok as crew but no good as officers.
Brits are an island race therefore natural seamen. The Philippines is a nation of 6000+ islands

The only difference between us and them is that they weren't being trained as officers. Now they are and they're just as good as us.

Ah yes, another field that was once the preserve of British workers, the finest in the world no doubt, but who somehow believed, until it was too late, that Indians or Filipinos or anyone else for that matter couldn't be trained to do their job just as well.

The Philippines, as you say 6,000 islands, what would they know about sailing or navigating?

 

[Tedsson]

No, it's capped currently, but the reason given IIRC was that there wasn't the expected amounts of gas down there, which is a bit strange as they had spent the previous years saying that there was a gold mine of gas there.
We suspect it was more to do with pausing for a bit whilst the protesters were moved out.
Rather amusingly, a local farmer who decided to do his bit to help the enviroment and allowed the eco-loons to use one of his fields had to get the bailiffs in as they wouldn't leave once the site closed.

I haven't read the whole thread so appos if this has been answered.

If you are referring to the Caudrilla well in Lancashire it was originally halted (last year) because there were three small earthquakes in the area. Government rules state that the plant must stop if there is a quake above R0.5. I don't know if it is up and running again.

As to estimates of how much gas might be down there (the original question) then YGIAGAM. I think it depends on which of the varying estimates fits your beliefs

The gas is mostly in the Bowland Shale Formation which lies under Lancashire, the Pennines and down to the Midlands. The original estimate was 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas (fifty years worth).

Last year the BGS revised this down to 200 trillion cubic feet.

The models used to estimate the first number were based on models using American data. They may not be applicable to the UK.. Also this is the gas in place and not necessarily the gas we can extract.

Yer pays yer munny and takes yer choice.

To see if you can frack in your back garden, check map:

 

[lastwalt]

I haven't read the whole thread so appos if this has been answered.

If you are referring to the Caudrilla well in Lancashire it was originally halted (last year) because there were three small earthquakes in the area. Government rules state that the plant must stop if there is a quake above R0.5. I don't know if it is up and running again.

As to estimates of how much gas might be down there (the original question) then YGIAGAM. I think it depends on which of the varying estimates fits your beliefs

The gas is mostly in the Bowland Shale Formation which lies under Lancashire, the Pennines and down to the Midlands. The original estimate was 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas (fifty years worth).

Last year the BGS revised this down to 200 trillion cubic feet.

The models used to estimate the first number were based on models using American data. They may not be applicable to the UK.. Also this is the gas in place and not necessarily the gas we can extract.

Yer pays yer munny and takes yer choice.

To see if you can frack in your back garden, check map:

View attachment 524329

It’s still suspended.

It’s also worth pointing out that there was a shale gas boom in Poland a few years ago too. The Polish Government and some private companies invested a large amount of money gearing up to replicate the US experience on their “plentiful” shale reserves.
Only, it turned out that no amount of fracking would make sufficient quantities of gas to make it flow, and most of the equipment, and a fair number of the personnel, involved in the early attempts at fracking on the Bowland came from redundant crews in Poland.

 

[Civvy Scum]

Frankly you’re talking bollocks. Bollocks with a distinct degree of racist ignorance.

I’ve worked in safety critical roles on some of Australia’s biggest construction projects with big engineering companies. They all carry much of their core engineering work in India and, increasingly, Pakistan. I can name at least three who have opened up significant in-house engineering offices in India to take advantage of the wealth of highly educated, quality engineering talent available, a resource that just doesn’t exist in Australia or the UK.

Same with IT. I know three highly successful IT entrepreneurs who have built globally recognised software platforms. Two built their software development centres in India and one in Pakistan. None of them would have got off the starting blocks without Indian sub-continent talent.

Your casual racism in referring to Indians as Guptas simply served to magnify your ignorance of the capabilities of Asian businesses and people.

You clearly didn't see the drawings I saw.

Presumably the senior management at both of the firms involved were also casually racist, as they both quickly took the decision to not use their overseas offices for UK work again, rather leaving them to do their own schemes locally.

Perhaps you've been lucky in your dealings with overseas design offices and I haven't.

 

[theinventor]

Frankly you’re talking bollocks. Bollocks with a distinct degree of racist ignorance.

I’ve worked in safety critical roles on some of Australia’s biggest construction projects with big engineering companies. They all carry much of their core engineering work in India and, increasingly, Pakistan. I can name at least three who have opened up significant in-house engineering offices in India to take advantage of the wealth of highly educated, quality engineering talent available, a resource that just doesn’t exist in Australia or the UK.

Same with IT. I know three highly successful IT entrepreneurs who have built globally recognised software platforms. Two built their software development centres in India and one in Pakistan. None of them would have got off the starting blocks without Indian sub-continent talent.

Your casual racism in referring to Indians as Guptas simply served to magnify your ignorance of the capabilities of Asian businesses and people.

In my experience, there are some outstandingly good Indian workers. On my current project, the senior developer is of "rock star" capability (with a dedication and work ethic second to none) and I'd happily pay him at UK rates for what he does.

On the other hand, Indian companies can also equal or excel in their ability to produce UK-grade middle-management idiots, it's probably where the UK was up to 20 years ago where if you went to the right school or had family connections you could get a management job without any requiremnent for competency. I guess at least they're cheaper, but the ability to snarl things up is just the same.

 

[bobthebuilder]

You clearly didn't see the drawings I saw.

Presumably the senior management at both of the firms involved were also casually racist, as they both quickly took the decision to not use their overseas offices for UK work again, rather leaving them to do their own schemes locally.

Perhaps you've been lucky in your dealings with overseas design offices and I haven't.

I’m not sure what you’re on about; all five companies I referenced have thriving design and development offices in India and / or Pakistan. In one of the engineering companies, I was “senior management” and was part of the decision making process to open the Mumbai office.

The key driver for this was that the we couldn’t recruit anywhere near enough engineers in the UK. They don’t exist. Certainly not with the high end design skills needed to design the kind of very complex projects that we did. The same is true of Australia where I now live and work; actually it’s far worse. Australia is building infrastructure projects that dwarf pretty much anything in the UK.

Both companies have invested heavily in their Indian technology centres to attract the best graduates from India’s excellent technology universities and subsequently develop them. They’ve also invested in the right object management systems to manage design information. They’ve done it for very sound business reasons, not to save money

The kind of low key information management issue that you are whining about just doesn’t and couldn’t happen. These aren’t companies doing small stuff; we’re talking projects of Crossrail scale and complexity.

However you dress it up, a generic and derogatory reference to Indians as Gupta is casual racism the belongs in the 70s. Frankly you’d be fired for gross misconduct in any of the businesses I’ve referenced if you were identified.

 

[dogmeat]

London is two city's:-
Old London town, i suspect is the original roman London, the 1.5 square mile of the City of London, the original 7* gated and walled roman settlement, now the northern hemispheres financial capital. Its a separate enclave to the city of Westminster, with its own laws, lord mayor and police force.

*Aldergate.
Aldersgate.
Bishopsgate.
Moorgate.
Cripplegate.
Newgate.
Ludgate.

 

[Toastie]

Frankly you’re talking bollocks. Bollocks with a distinct degree of racist ignorance.

I’ve worked in safety critical roles on some of Australia’s biggest construction projects with big engineering companies. They all carry much of their core engineering work in India and, increasingly, Pakistan. I can name at least three who have opened up significant in-house engineering offices in India to take advantage of the wealth of highly educated, quality engineering talent available, a resource that just doesn’t exist in Australia or the UK.

Same with IT. I know three highly successful IT entrepreneurs who have built globally recognised software platforms. Two built their software development centres in India and one in Pakistan. None of them would have got off the starting blocks without Indian sub-continent talent.

Your casual racism in referring to Indians as Guptas simply served to magnify your ignorance of the capabilities of Asian businesses and people.

Do you ever stop?

Here we are, 8 pages into a thread on the North South divide in the U.K. and you and your buddy @Mike Barton have rolled in like a tag team of prolapsed rectums, dribbling shite everywhere you go.

Every bloody thread, in you come posting in a style that demands the reader bow down to your superior knowledge on, well, everything really. It follows a pattern: You start with a reasonable enough counter argument but as time goes by, it descends into “as a mega businessman who has been involved in every project from the first heart transplant to putting a man on Mars, this is how it is”.

When challenged you then descend into snide remarks. You did it in the BA redundancies thread, you did it in the Lewis Hamilton thread (add tax consultant to your burgeoning CV) and now your doing it here. Just a sample but you get the point. Or probably not.

So why the outburst? Well, in the above post you started chucking racist accusations. You start by asserting that because someone in their experience has felt that other nationalities aren’t able to produce work to as high a standard in the U.K., that’s racist. You have a different view but because yours doesn’t tally with his you try to add weight to your blustering self promotion not by debating the point but by denigrating the poster. In other words, playing the man, not the ball.

You then show stunning ignorance and closet racism of your own. This section of the conversation started when I penned a picture involving the life of a fictional character I called Fred, a U.K. based office drone. Shortly afterwards, somebody suggested that Fred’s job might soon move to India and be taken by someone he called Gupta. These two tales started with “0600, Fred / Gupta roll out of bed”. It was a furtherance of an illustration and Gupta and Fred have continued to be our characters for a few pages, adding the human dimension.

A short pause here, you of course don’t get the human dimension, people are just payroll numbers to you, get the best from them and discard them. In your pursuit of Australian talent, did you ever consider training some up or were the Asians just more cost efficient?

Anyway, back to Fred and Gupta (a few other support actors have also crept in). A simple fact is that a lot of people in India are called Gupta and a lot of people in the U.K. are called Fred. Next time you hook up with one of your mates from the sub continent, tell him you’re going to call him Fred now as Gupta is too Indian. I’m willing to bet he’d see that as racist, patronising and a very great deal more. He might even suggest to you that such an act went out in the late 40s when that bit of the map stopped being pink and Indian self determination meant they no longer had to suffer the indignity of being subjugated by such things as having anglicised names forced upon them?

Or he might kick you in the balls as a service to mankind.

You may have noticed that as a military themed website people occasionally exchange their views on others in the vernacular. Sometimes this is banter, sometimes this is an expression of their heartfelt dislike for someone. You just snipe which to me illustrates the point that you don’t get the idea behind this forum and you don’t have balls enough to just feck them off. You just run people down, make snide comments on bus drivers, racists, ignorance and make a point of telling everyone how wrong they are, all of the time. I guess a lifetime of kowtowing to HR is part of Big Business.

To summarise. You’re a bluffer. And a not very nice human being. A total cock if you will.

 

[Civvy Scum]

I'm talking about motorway maintenance (including bridges) schemes. Simple enough jobs that overseas offices of two different employers (India and Malaysia) made a right pigs ear of. I suspect in both cases because management thought that minimal information sent out was enough, because that's all we ever got - but we knew what was needed as we'd taken jobs that we'd designed out on site to build, so knew what the drawings needed to show. That on site experience is not something Johnny Foreigner is ever going to be doing in the UK. Said experience being hard won sometimes, you learn from your mistakes.

Office-based CAD monkeys all too often just bash out drawings, what's on them can mean nothing to them. I see it in the drawings I check now as part of my job, but at least they have the opportunity to go on site, if only occasionally and see their designs in reality and speak to the blokes implementing them.

I know when I started on the motorways in the late 80s I thought I was a decent ex-local highway authority designer. Designed my first job and took it on site. The next 10 weeks were a very steep learning curve to say the least. Experience is everything.

 

[Mike Barton]

Do you ever stop?

Here we are, 8 pages into a thread on the North South divide in the U.K. and you and your buddy @Mike Barton have rolled in like a tag team of prolapsed rectums, dribbling shite everywhere you go.

Every bloody thread, in you come posting in a style that demands the reader bow down to your superior knowledge on, well, everything really. It follows a pattern: You start with a reasonable enough counter argument but as time goes by, it descends into “as a mega businessman who has been involved in every project from the first heart transplant to putting a man on Mars, this is how it is”.

When challenged you then descend into snide remarks. You did it in the BA redundancies thread, you did it in the Lewis Hamilton thread (add tax consultant to your burgeoning CV) and now your doing it here. Just a sample but you get the point. Or probably not.

So why the outburst? Well, in the above post you started chucking racist accusations. You start by asserting that because someone in their experience has felt that other nationalities aren’t able to produce work to as high a standard in the U.K., that’s racist. You have a different view but because yours doesn’t tally with his you try to add weight to your blustering self promotion not by debating the point but by denigrating the poster. In other words, playing the man, not the ball.

You then show stunning ignorance and closet racism of your own. This section of the conversation started when I penned a picture involving the life of a fictional character I called Fred, a U.K. based office drone. Shortly afterwards, somebody suggested that Fred’s job might soon move to India and be taken by someone he called Gupta. These two tales started with “0600, Fred / Gupta roll out of bed”. It was a furtherance of an illustration and Gupta and Fred have continued to be our characters for a few pages, adding the human dimension.

A short pause here, you of course don’t get the human dimension, people are just payroll numbers to you, get the best from them and discard them. In your pursuit of Australian talent, did you ever consider training some up or were the Asians just more cost efficient?

Anyway, back to Fred and Gupta (a few other support actors have also crept in). A simple fact is that a lot of people in India are called Gupta and a lot of people in the U.K. are called Fred. Next time you hook up with one of your mates from the sub continent, tell him you’re going to call him Fred now as Gupta is too Indian. I’m willing to bet he’d see that as racist, patronising and a very great deal more. He might even suggest to you that such an act went out in the late 40s when that bit of the map stopped being pink and Indian self determination meant they no longer had to suffer the indignity of being subjugated by such things as having anglicised names forced upon them?

Or he might kick you in the balls as a service to mankind.

You may have noticed that as a military themed website people occasionally exchange their views on others in the vernacular. Sometimes this is banter, sometimes this is an expression of their heartfelt dislike for someone. You just snipe which to me illustrates the point that you don’t get the idea behind this forum and you don’t have balls enough to just feck them off. You just run people down, make snide comments on bus drivers, racists, ignorance and make a point of telling everyone how wrong they are, all of the time. I guess a lifetime of kowtowing to HR is part of Big Business.

To summarise. You’re a bluffer. And a not very nice human being. A total cock if you will.

I wasn't aware that I was a buddy of Bob's, and far from being a "tag team" I don't think I have ever had a conversation with him on this forum, as we tend to have different interests and backgrounds.

I am sorry you think I am dribbling like a prolapsed rectum, but I am making a point that is relevant to the thread. It is that the entire UK is very rapidly heading into the same territory that the North of England entered into forty or more years ago, and that service-oriented towns and cities in the Southeast will soon resemble Northern coal-mining towns and steel towns after the pits and mills closed in the 70s and 80s.

I am convinced that huge swathes of the UK's service sector is going to be outsourced to Asia within five years, and people who say "oh no, they'll never match our majestic standards" are whistling past the graveyard.

That's the point, a valid one I believe, no one told me you had been made the thread policeman but I will be sure to run my posts by you in the future to ensure they meet your approval.

Dribble out.

 

[bobthebuilder]

Do you ever stop?

Here we are, 8 pages into a thread on the North South divide in the U.K. and you and your buddy @Mike Barton have rolled in like a tag team of prolapsed rectums, dribbling shite everywhere you go.

Every bloody thread, in you come posting in a style that demands the reader bow down to your superior knowledge on, well, everything really. It follows a pattern: You start with a reasonable enough counter argument but as time goes by, it descends into “as a mega businessman who has been involved in every project from the first heart transplant to putting a man on Mars, this is how it is”.

When challenged you then descend into snide remarks. You did it in the BA redundancies thread, you did it in the Lewis Hamilton thread (add tax consultant to your burgeoning CV) and now your doing it here. Just a sample but you get the point. Or probably not.

So why the outburst? Well, in the above post you started chucking racist accusations. You start by asserting that because someone in their experience has felt that other nationalities aren’t able to produce work to as high a standard in the U.K., that’s racist. You have a different view but because yours doesn’t tally with his you try to add weight to your blustering self promotion not by debating the point but by denigrating the poster. In other words, playing the man, not the ball.

You then show stunning ignorance and closet racism of your own. This section of the conversation started when I penned a picture involving the life of a fictional character I called Fred, a U.K. based office drone. Shortly afterwards, somebody suggested that Fred’s job might soon move to India and be taken by someone he called Gupta. These two tales started with “0600, Fred / Gupta roll out of bed”. It was a furtherance of an illustration and Gupta and Fred have continued to be our characters for a few pages, adding the human dimension.

A short pause here, you of course don’t get the human dimension, people are just payroll numbers to you, get the best from them and discard them. In your pursuit of Australian talent, did you ever consider training some up or were the Asians just more cost efficient?

Anyway, back to Fred and Gupta (a few other support actors have also crept in). A simple fact is that a lot of people in India are called Gupta and a lot of people in the U.K. are called Fred. Next time you hook up with one of your mates from the sub continent, tell him you’re going to call him Fred now as Gupta is too Indian. I’m willing to bet he’d see that as racist, patronising and a very great deal more. He might even suggest to you that such an act went out in the late 40s when that bit of the map stopped being pink and Indian self determination meant they no longer had to suffer the indignity of being subjugated by such things as having anglicised names forced upon them?

Or he might kick you in the balls as a service to mankind.

You may have noticed that as a military themed website people occasionally exchange their views on others in the vernacular. Sometimes this is banter, sometimes this is an expression of their heartfelt dislike for someone. You just snipe which to me illustrates the point that you don’t get the idea behind this forum and you don’t have balls enough to just feck them off. You just run people down, make snide comments on bus drivers, racists, ignorance and make a point of telling everyone how wrong they are, all of the time. I guess a lifetime of kowtowing to HR is part of Big Business.

To summarise. You’re a bluffer. And a not very nice human being. A total cock if you will.

It wasn’t me who used the pejorative term “Gupta” in a very narrow, ignorant and prejudiced and plain wrong description of the capabilities of Indian engineering and IT capabilities. You may well have used it jokingly, but even then it was pejorative. Civvy Scum’s used in a post on engineering that, read alone, was plain racist. I am not lying when I say I would summarily dismiss an employee who used that language.

And you are totally wrong about my view of the human dimension. I’ve had to make people redundant and I hate it. I’ve also faced it. In the space of a year, both I and my partner were made redundant and had to sell our house haven’t worked for anyone since. The risk of redundancy is a fact of life if you are an employee. And if you hang around in the same job with the same company for 30 years, it’s both inevitable and bloody hard to recover. I’m very sympathetic towards people who are made redundant. I have very little sympathy for those who think it’s the end of the world.

I don’t profess to be a hugely successful businessman, but I’ve kept my family comfortable and provided employment for upwards of twenty others, the last ten as an entrepreneur. I’ve been in the boardrooms of big corporate and I’ve sunk everything I have in to startups. My perspective is one of a survivor; I’ve had businesses go bust (and that is far harder than redundancy).

If one of my current ventures scales, one thing I will do is put cash and effort into nurturing young entrepreneurs. So yes, I do get the human dimension. Just not the entitled bit.

This is a military themed website. But it’s also a place of debate. It would be ******* dull if people didn’t argue different perspectives and didn’t argue their points in different styles. You can always ignore me if you wish.

But as you chose to challenge, my last point. I dislike trade unions. They bring nothing whatsoever to a business, just overhead. And I hate trade trade union leaders; I’ve yet to meet one who isn’t interested the take.

 

[bobthebuilder]

I'm talking about motorway maintenance (including bridges) schemes. Simple enough jobs that overseas offices of two different employers (India and Malaysia) made a right pigs ear of. I suspect in both cases because management thought that minimal information sent out was enough, because that's all we ever got - but we knew what was needed as we'd taken jobs that we'd designed out on site to build, so knew what the drawings needed to show. That on site experience is not something Johnny Foreigner is ever going to be doing in the UK. Said experience being hard won sometimes, you learn from your mistakes.

Office-based CAD monkeys all too often just bash out drawings, what's on them can mean nothing to them. I see it in the drawings I check now as part of my job, but at least they have the opportunity to go on site, if only occasionally and see their designs in reality and speak to the blokes implementing them.

I know when I started on the motorways in the late 80s I thought I was a decent ex-local highway authority designer. Designed my first job and took it on site. The next 10 weeks were a very steep learning curve to say the least. Experience is everything.

Now tell me, how many new motorways, railways, tube lines, large span bridges, dams, airports, tunnels, ports, power stations, oil and gas plants, skyscrapers, ship etc etc have been built in the UK in the last 30 years? And then go and look at India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea etc etc.

Who has the experience?

 

[Civvy Scum]

It wasn’t me who used the pejorative term “Gupta” in a very narrow, ignorant and prejudiced and plain wrong description of the capabilities of Indian engineering and IT capabilities. You may well have used it jokingly, but even then it was pejorative. Civvy Scum’s used in a post on engineering that, read alone, was plain racist. I am not lying when I say I would summarily dismiss an employee who used that language.

And you are totally wrong about my view of the human dimension. I’ve had to make people redundant and I hate it. I’ve also faced it. In the space of a year, both I and my partner were made redundant and had to sell our house haven’t worked for anyone since. The risk of redundancy is a fact of life if you are an employee. And if you hang around in the same job with the same company for 30 years, it’s both inevitable and bloody hard to recover. I’m very sympathetic towards people who are made redundant. I have very little sympathy for those who think it’s the end of the world.

I don’t profess to be a hugely successful businessman, but I’ve kept my family comfortable and provided employment for upwards of twenty others, the last ten as an entrepreneur. I’ve been in the boardrooms of big corporate and I’ve sunk everything I have in to startups. My perspective is one of a survivor; I’ve had businesses go bust (and that is far harder than redundancy).

If one of my current ventures scales, one thing I will do is put cash and effort into nurturing young entrepreneurs. So yes, I do get the human dimension. Just not the entitled bit.

This is a military themed website. But it’s also a place of debate. It would be ******* dull if people didn’t argue different perspectives and didn’t argue their points in different styles. You can always ignore me if you wish.

But as you chose to challenge, my last point. I dislike trade unions. They bring nothing whatsoever to a business, just overhead. And I hate trade trade union leaders; I’ve yet to meet one who isn’t interested the take.

Redundancy is inevitable if you stick in the same job for 30 years? Most certainly not so in my case and that of many of my colleagues. Admittedly over the years we've TUPE'd across to different employers as contracts come and go but our main "employer" (HMG) has been the same, in the guise of DfT, the Highways Agency and Highways England. Many of us have done more or less the same job in that time as well.

A job needs to be done, so it needs people who know how to do it. The client needs confidence you wont drop them in it, so being cheap and N thousand miles away tends not to do that in my experience - on both occasions, concern was quietly expressed by the client. Turns out they were right. To be fair, no one saw it coming the first time, "Give Johnny Foreigner a chance". The second time, with the second employer, there were quiet, "Do you think that's wise Captain Mainwaring" type comments made by those of us who'd seen the first debacle. We were told (in management-speak) to STFU. So we did. Later, when it all went pear-shaped, we weren't daft enough to say ,"Told you so", but I suspect senior management picked up on the vibe. To get back on topic, we were Northerners driven by a desire to do a good job and stay in employment and the management were Southerners driven by money. Hey-ho, what do us northern monkeys know eh?

As for "Gupta". Paddy, Mick, Taffy, Jock, Cletus - would you summarily dismiss someone for using those names to identify Bill, Harry, George, James and John? Casual racism or not?

Over the years I've worked with extremely competent foreigners of all hues. There's an Indian bridge engineer I VERY highly value. The same goes for a Palestinian one. We all used to rip the piss out of each other in the office, with never any offence taken, we all gave as good as we got. It's called the craic and is good for team building. Perhaps they don't have it in your neck of the woods?

There are other foreigners I've come across I wouldn't pay in washers. The same goes for Brits as well, I know some extremely good ones and some right oxygen thieves. Racist I am not. Nor am I a snowflake who takes offence on the part of others. Have a word with yourself.

 

[Civvy Scum]

Now tell me, how many new motorways, railways, tube lines, large span bridges, dams, airports, tunnels, ports, power stations, oil and gas plants, skyscrapers, ship etc etc have been built in the UK in the last 30 years? And then go and look at India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea etc etc.

Who has the experience?

At working in the UK, to UK standards and knowing how things work in the UK, including dealing with outside bodies in the UK? Now let me think about that for a second...

 

[Tedsson]

Now tell me, how many new motorways, railways, tube lines, large span bridges, dams, airports, tunnels, ports, power stations, oil and gas plants, skyscrapers, ship etc etc have been built in the UK in the last 30 years? And then go and look at India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea etc etc.

Very few. And therein lies the rub.

40-50 years ago I had a British TV, hi-fi, car, radios, white goods etc.

Now virtually everything I own is made by bloody Samsung - TV, sound bar, laptops, fridge. My Ipad has an apple on it but over 40% of its guts are Samsung. Last time I went to Ireland even the sodding ferry was built by Samsung.

The real problem is that British capital does not see any profit in manufacturing and has not done so for decades. This country can make very good stuff - we even export specialist steel and aluminium to America FFS - but nobody will ever invest in it. Capital cannot see where the profit comes from in manufacturing.

There is no better example of this than Jaguar Land Rover. Ford spent a fortune on them, bringing them up to Ford's usual total quality standards. When Ford divested itself of it's PAG (Jag, Aston, Volvo etc) no British investor would even look at it. It was sold to TATA for $2.3billion (dunno what that was in £££ back in 2008 . Last profit figure I saw was £1.7billion pounds. So it was hardly a duff investment.

As a country our manufacturing company output is more than most people think and more than the ONS/Treasury states (outsourced stuff is off balance sheet and accrues to the service sector). Maybe we need to capitalise on this with something like a National Industrial Investment Bank to bring together money, innovation and skills. We should, for example, be leading the world in developments like graphene but to date we lag behind the field (despite inventing it).

 

[lokiuk]

At working in the UK, to UK standards and knowing how things work in the UK, including dealing with outside bodies in the UK? Now let me think about that for a second...

Also in some fields like IT, cultural differences really do play a part

Successful IT projects need people who will kick back and question poor requirements and decisions, as it will save money in the long run

Some countries where work is outsourced there is a culture of saying yes to anything, and not admitting when there are problems, not everyone is like that of course but that alone can be costly before you get onto more usual stereotypes

 

[Turret_Monster]

...to date we lag behind the field (despite inventing it).

This is the British way. Sell the right to manufacture something for a quick return to whoever ‘owns’ it.

 

[Tedsson]

This is the British way. Sell the right to manufacture something for a quick return to whoever ‘owns’ it.

Sadly correct.

The quick buck. The easy deal. Take the money and run. Rapid returns. Please the shareholders (the only legal requirement on a board). Long term investment - feckorf.

The industrial revolution was built on the capital of men who had accrued wealth from wool. This wealth, combined with technical innovation meant people patented an idea, set up a factory, made and sold stuff and reinvested the profits. USW.

Nowadays capital is stuck in a hedge fund and is gambled in a zero sum Ponzi scheme.

 

[dogmeat]

Now tell me, how many new motorways, railways, tube lines, large span bridges, dams, airports, tunnels, ports, power stations, oil and gas plants, skyscrapers, ship etc etc have been built in the UK in the last 30 years? And then go and look at India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea etc etc.

Who has the experience?

You tell 'im Bob.

 

[bobthebuilder]

The quick buck. The easy deal. Take the money and run. Rapid returns. Please the shareholders (the only legal requirement on a board). Long term investment - feckorf.

The industrial revolution was built on the capital of men who had accrued wealth from wool. This wealth, combined with technical innovation meant people patented an idea, set up a factory, made and sold stuff and reinvested the profits. USW.

Nowadays capital is stuck in a hedge fund and is gambled in a zero sum Ponzi scheme.

I’ve had my lecture from @Toastie, so I’m “afraid” to enter a debate. But actually hedge funds are reasonably efficient at using capital. We should be more worried about how so much capital is tied up in property, to the tune that most wage earners have to dedicate their entire working lives to owning a house when they retire. There are no economic benefits beyond the building industry in this obsession about eating wealth through property investment.

Actually the North is pretty much the last bastion of affordable housing. Everywhere else, a huge percentage of the nation’s product is devoted to paying interest in a dumb asset.