You are Mystic Meg and I claim my £5

I think that you are bang on.
Next thing you know is that Boris will employ an extreme right wing adviser, who advocates euthanasia for anyone who doesnt fit the "Tory ideal"
Mind you, I dont think that could happen in a civilised society

I think you make some good points - are we saying that no Brits should be expected to do unskilled labour?

My view is we don't as a nation invest enough in our workforce and we have to start somewhere. The knock on effect of that is the quality of management in this country is well below where it should and if we want to stop your scenario then we need to have good quality middle managers who can add real value and who can take their team on a quality journey.

As the saying goes "you reap what you sew"

she could always not get pregnant with kids she can't afford?

No "we're" not - I, however, am saying that the immigration policy is incoherent, runs counter to a strong economy and is based on nothing more than a desire to appease the new Tory base, which includes a significant number of people who are vocally anti-immigration. Sooner or later, it will butt up against their previous base - business - who will rail against the notion that they have to keep increasing wages; that means higher prices, or lower shareholder dividends, or both if increasing prices loses market share.

I am at the sharp end of this - we can't recruit people in the numbers we need for love nor money, despite a training and development spend that is 25% higher than our sector average, and paying hourly rates that are above the NLW. There is something about the nature of the work that we do, that many Brits feel is beneath them; or its too hard; or something else - because the H&S Care sector is currently running at 100k vacancies and rising, so it's definitely not just us. I would love to be able to recruit a few hundred migrant workers who want to make a life here - it would solve most of my problems.

I'm not sure where you get your information about the quality of L&M in the UK; it's not my experience, but I willingly admit that my experience is limited to the places/sectors I've worked in. There are always examples of people who have been promoted to the levels of their own incompetence - Priti Patel is a good one - but I don't see it as an endemic issue - and it has little to do with the subject under discussion.

Ifyou are serious, post a link to a job advert, I am sure I can find 25 applicants iF you are genuine...

Quote ="IR80"Ifyou are serious, post a link to a job advert, I am sure I can find 25 applicants iF you are genuine...'" Just have a look on the NHS website, there were approaching 100,000 vacancies in the NHS so, you are going to need to know an awful lot of people and with a diverse range of skills. https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/cgi-bin/login_applicant.cgi Fill your boots !

Quote ="IR80"Ifyou are serious, post a link to a job advert, I am sure I can find 25 applicants iF you are genuine...'" Just have a look on the NHS website, there were approaching 100,000 vacancies in the NHS so, you are going to need to know an awful lot of people and with a diverse range of skills. https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/cgi-bin/login_applicant.cgi Fill your boots !

Yes of course, because I have a genuine and sincere belief that all the expertise of an organisation turning over 49 million pounds a year, has missed something that an anonymous RL message board agitator can solve in half an hour.

The 100k figure is well publicised - feel free to Google it; but no, I won't be hiring you as a recruitment consultant, thanks all the same.

I disagree - we can't recruit at the lowest level because we cannot present a vision of what the future will be and more importantly back it up with hard facts and positive examples. Why is that we are great at innovation but we cannot turn innovation into big numbers - because we don't have the management expertise to deliver it.

Surely your industry would fall into the emergency category whereby rules would be relaxed?

If your business turnover £50m - which is similar to mine then you don't have anything like 100k vacancies - as the cost of that number at the new minimum wage of c18k would 1.8bn - so you can only be looking to recruit <100 probably <50.

Interesting conclusion drawn there Sal.

I would suggest that the opposite is true.

We have the brains, innovation and skills required but, there are far cheaper labour sources elsewhere in the world to turn ideas into "products", leaving our friends in the "East" to actually produce so many of the new products, something that the UK cannot hope to compete with.

Because detail matters.

How do economies like Germany many to have such a strong manufacturing base?

So how many vacancies do you actually have?

Traditionally they have had different industrial relations, with better collaboration between workers and management. I have some personal theories around the cultural reasons behind that, but I’d admit that they’re speculative. They also cover relative performance of England and Germany in international football tournaments and the ongoing failure of English football managers to win the Premier League, or even really compete for it.

Firstly, they didnt have to undergo the vandalism of Thatcher, secondly Enginners are highly respected and finally, apprenticeship training is valued as much as a university based education.

You are delusional if you think Thatcher caused the issues of manufacturing in this country - it was long gone well before she came to power. Labour under Wilson and Callaghan allowed union power to decimate manufacturing in this country. This along with poor management saw production move to economies that embrace investment in development of employees. It is no surprise that the examples of world class manufacturing in this country come from businesses with foreign owners who have encouraged the culture and practises of the motherland.

I think that they have valued some of their traditional industries and their government has a strategic plan on how to rune their ecconomy.
We on the other hand have smashed our traditional industries and sold off anything and everything to the highest bidder, leaving everything to "the markets".
Privatising many of our primary assets, for a short term windfall, was not the best idea. Not only has this meant allowing all of the profits to go overseas and left the public vulnerable to swingeing increases in prices, which wouldn't have been tolerated under public ownership, we are all now at the mercy of others for our key utilities.

I agree with your second point unfortunately we are a service-based economy where academic knowledge is important in progressing these businesses.

You've just answered your own question... "How do economies like Germany many to have such a strong manufacturing base?"

Instead of making physical things and doing proper graft, the majority of us sit at computers, send emails, and answer phones for a living.

Quote ="Sal Paradise"How do economies like Germany many to have such a strong manufacturing base?'" You would have thought that the red tape imposed on them by Brussels bureaucrats would have strangled their industries What's also interesting is that they face higher tax rates in Germany too: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/ ... stralia-us "Basic rates of tax are around the same as in Britain (ranging from 19% to a top rate of 45%), but workers have to pay an extra 10% for state pensions, 8% for health, 1.5% for unemployment cover and 1% for care insurance. That all adds up to a lot more than Britain’s 12% national insurance but, like France, Germany’s public services and welfare payouts are regarded as far superior." "The big shock for British taxpayers is the country’s church tax, which is 8% or 9% of income tax paid, depending on which part of Germany you live in. Under German law, anyone who has been baptised is automatically a member of the church and obliged to pay the tax, irrespective of their beliefs or whether they attend church services. Individuals can formally renounce their church membership and stop paying the tax, but they may risk losing access to some of the country’s best schools and childcare facilities." Surely what you would expect is that with those tax rates the wealth creators would simply take their wealth elsewhere to somewhere like the UK where the state and church are not confiscating it to pay for "superior welfare hand outs".

Quote ="Sal Paradise"How do economies like Germany many to have such a strong manufacturing base?'" You would have thought that the red tape imposed on them by Brussels bureaucrats would have strangled their industries What's also interesting is that they face higher tax rates in Germany too: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/ ... stralia-us "Basic rates of tax are around the same as in Britain (ranging from 19% to a top rate of 45%), but workers have to pay an extra 10% for state pensions, 8% for health, 1.5% for unemployment cover and 1% for care insurance. That all adds up to a lot more than Britain’s 12% national insurance but, like France, Germany’s public services and welfare payouts are regarded as far superior." "The big shock for British taxpayers is the country’s church tax, which is 8% or 9% of income tax paid, depending on which part of Germany you live in. Under German law, anyone who has been baptised is automatically a member of the church and obliged to pay the tax, irrespective of their beliefs or whether they attend church services. Individuals can formally renounce their church membership and stop paying the tax, but they may risk losing access to some of the country’s best schools and childcare facilities." Surely what you would expect is that with those tax rates the wealth creators would simply take their wealth elsewhere to somewhere like the UK where the state and church are not confiscating it to pay for "superior welfare hand outs".

The question was we cannot compete with low cost manufacturing - my question was how can Germany manage it given the EU is keen to ensure we don't become a low cost economy and undercut the rest of the EU?

Simple. Plenty of people are prepared to pay for quality. Germany don't need to compete with economies churning out cheap crap, because they're not making cheap crap. There is a huge amount of people who don't subscribe to the cheapest is best, race to the bottom.

Agreed - but we produce high quality niche products - my question was why can't we in the UK replicate what is happening in Germany in respect of manufacturing. This was countered by saying it has all gone to China? My point was that we never had the quality of management to drive the sector forward.

Too many successive governments who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Always selling the promise of cheaper stuff to the masses.

When 'true patriot' Jacob Rees-Mogg was selling his vision of a 'cheap shoes' Brexit, where do you think these shoes were going to come from? The traditional makers in Northampton, or the sweat shops in Bangladesh?

We didn't get millions of pounds of inward investment after starting two world wars.