Saturday 21 February 2009

Uk Industry, What Industry?

It seems that a UK car plant, employing directly or indirectly 6000 workers is on the brink of closing down.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7901092.stm

It looks like the selling of all our industries will come home to roost over the next 12 months. Its a sad state of affairs that I can't only immediately think of one major manufacturer that is totally British based and owned, of cars or any anything else.

Thats another big problem that will hit hard during the depression: foreign owned manufacturing being dropped here and taken abroad. The same thing happened with the banks: Iceland was slapped and had its banking assets seized under anti-terror laws, then all the other banks decided to pull out, leaving a big hole for UK banks to fill. Thats why no-one can get loans, because the number of banks in the market has suddenly decreased by a huge percentage.

Manufacturing has to go the same way, as owners look at profits and then see how easily/cheaply they can shut facilities here, compared with the rest of Europe. After all, our flexible (read expendable) labour market is the whole reason foreign companies like Toyota, Nissan and Honda came here in the first place and why Tata bought into Land Rover and Jaguar.

One more nail in the coffin of this country. I really do have doubts as to whether we could get a loan off the IMF if it ever came to it. Just what could we guarantee the loan with, or generate the cash with which to pay it back? A nation of minimum wage callcentres and shops isn't going to generate enough wealth to make a dent in the Trillions of pounds worth of debt the country owes.

I really do wonder how bad it has to get before the Mainstream Media, the government and their propaganda arm (the BBC) will start to acnowledge what is happening.

Or are things so scarily bad that they daren't risk letting us know?

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