| Topic: | Re:Re:No longer Great Britain manufacturing wise | |
| Posted by: | Sam Hearn Cllr | |
| Date/Time: | 27/03/12 15:19:00 |
| If you let economists and staticians measure anything there is always a strong element of smoke and mirrors. When my friend with an Oxford Degree and an MBA worked for Nestle marketing KitKats he was in the food and confectionary sector. Soon after he went to Twfords marketing lavatories and was counted as working in manufacturing. When he took a job flogging houses for a builder in the North East he was in the construction sector. Now he has a job in Canary Wharf marketing the services of an international firm of accountants and tax advisers. He is not a confectioner, a manufacturing or a construction worker and he sure as hell is not an accounatnt or a financial adviser - he is a marketing professional. You can apply this way of looking at things to a myriad of jobs and careers from working in HR, to accounts clerking to computer programming. What matters is surely not what sector we work in but that all of us have the chance to use and develop our skills & talents, and if we so choose to maximise our earning capacity. Good for us, good for HMRC and good for the UK. If we are superb at designing hoovers/dysons but others can make them more cheaply should we not stick to designing them and not risk investing our capital in machinery and buildings that become rapidly obsolete? Do we need screwdriver and spanner assembly jobs just to keep people employed? May be - but do not ask me to subsidise it in perpetuity out of my taxes or even to buy the products simply because they were assembled here. One of the UKs biggest exporters and tax cash cows is the Scottish Whisky industry. As anyone who has been around a distillery recently knows these 'chemical process plants' virtually run themselves nowadays. However upstream in the process there are jobs in farming and engineering, and down stream there is employment in everything from transportation and retailing to marketing and financial services. The number of jobs in manufacturing the whisky is minute and frankly does not really need to be done in Scotland. |