I’ve talked a lot recently about reindustrialisation. Now, I’m fairly certain David Cameron hasn’t been reading what I write. But I’m also fairly certain we have been looking at the same statistics: Manufacturing has shrunk from nearly 40 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product in the late 1950s to not much more than 10 percent now. And while Cameron might not put it this way, that has left Britain as a shrivelled husk of an economy: overly reliant on services, foreign oil, Chinese manufacturing, junk food, corporate handouts, and too-big-to-fail-too-big-not-to-fail financials. So it’s no surprise that Cameron has been talking up manufacturing. From Bloomberg:
Prime Minister David Cameron has latched on to manufacturing as a cure for Britain’s economic hangover and its 7.9 percent jobless rate. U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable says that for sustainable, long-term growth, “manufacturing is where we need to be.”
“One of the main growth sectors of the economy in recent years has been banking,” Cable said in an interview. “For reasons that are blindingly obvious, that’s not going to be so important in future.”
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