Quote ="silver2"A lack of investment over many decades and a lack of understanding from the country's decision makers. There are too many people with financial and legal backgrounds in government and not enough engineers and scientists.'"
The decision makers understood exactly what the situation was. Look at the industries which are being talked about on this thread, generally heavily labour intensive production plants who were producing things which weren't in enough demand. If the government had endlessly gone on subsidising them then the UK economy would have slipped backwards into the dark ages, we would have been trying to compete with countries who have large pools of low paid manual workers, who are willing to work for low wages, which is why their manufactured goods are more competitive.
Which would have forced us into the unpalatable position where to match their productivity we would have needed to accept much lower wages, something which would have caused mass industrial unrest. UK workers aren't willing to do that as can be seen by the hostility towards eastern European workers who 'come over here and work for lower wages', yes that's exactly what they do and exactly what they do overseas as well.
There is an argument I agree that there has been underinvestment in technical education, compare the UK to Germany for instance, the technical education over there is much better. Germany is not competitive because it is paying ultra low wages, its competitive because they have very high levels of technical education, and are very efficient at producing high quality products. The education system in the UK is different but the UK is not bad, the higher education system in the UK for example is much better developed in Germany and the service sector in the UK especially the financial services sector is much better developed in the UK. As that's where our comparative advantage is why not specialise in it? The services sector in the UK brings money in, the City brings in huge amounts of money, far more than we would have got through trying to artificially prop up declining manufacturing industries which could not compete with overseas competitors.
The world has moved on, there is not the demand for these heavily labour intensive manufactured goods any more. People want cheaply produced hi tech electronic equipment like the stuff the Japanese produce. Also I am not sure the younger generation really miss these old industries, were they really good places to work, or were they noisy dirty smelly places with bad health and safety records....we may as well say what happened to the old cotton mill industry!
