I love buying stuff made in Britain. For many reasons.
We make some cool stuff — think Bentley, Burberry, Bovril — and I like the idea of continuing the legacy of heritage brands that mean a lot, or have meant a lot to this country at some point.
But we don’t really make anything here anymore. This creates a twofold problem, whereby a) we have a bloated management and bureaucratic sector and b) we don’t actually generate much stuff of actual value. Both of these tendencies make our economy very fragile, as I’m sure the fallout from this COVID-induced economic crisis will sadly demonstrate.
We often talk about the decline of manufacturing in the 20th century, but manufacturing hasn’t really declined, just moved to China (mostly). As global markets opened up, and as China liberalised its economy in 1989, manufacturers couldn’t believe their eyes. The labour markets that had become available to them were a gold mine.
What these companies didn’t know (or ignored due to their greed) is the fact that these markets should never have existed in the first place. They are made possible by slave labour, child labour, suppression and mistreatment of workers, and most disgracefully of all: totalitarianism. We hollowed out our own national economy, and in turn bolstered the control and power of some pretty nasty regimes.
Over here, this meant that we transitioned from a goods-producing economy to a service sector economy. Let’s take it back to my ‘village test’. If we live in a village, and a large proportion of our villagers don’t actually produce anything tangible (food, technology, infrastructure), then we rely on other villages for those things. In other words, we are completely at the mercy of the other villages upon whom we rely.
We need to start making stuff again, so that our economy has a real, concrete foundation, and so people have jobs that have a chance of surviving when the proverbial hits the fan. Cars, clothes, food, whatever. We just need a bit of good old fashioned British invention. We’re home to several of the world’s best universities. Let’s get thinking, making, growing, and building. And if we‘re not doing it ourselves, let’s give our economic support to people that are.
Sack off the Dutch tomatoes, and buy a jumper made of shetland wool.
