PRINCIPLES

1. Britain must rebuild it's industrial base to provide productive and satisfying work for creative and inventive people. No other European country is selling off it's industry and allowing it to decline like we are. Countries such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and now China that were poor not long ago were prepared to make the large investment needed to build high tech. semiconductor and other plants but we weren't, why? I think the first three now have a higher per capita income than us now and China is taking off like a rocket.
2. Britain must continue to have a strong capability in key industries such as shipbuilding, aerospace, electronics, road and rail vehicle building. It appears that we will have to practise protectionism just as Japan and France (and others) have always done.
3. This country is being swamped with imports to a greater extent than any of the other major countries in Europe, there appears to be a serious risk of acute balance of payments problems in the not very distant future.
4. Far too high a proportion of our industry is foreign owned and controlled. When times get hard, the first factories to be closed are the ones in this country.
5. Successive governments have offered enormous inducements to foreign companies to persuade them to invest in this country, they should have spent this money on strengthening British companies instead of making survival more difficult for them.
6. If the rules of the European Union impede the reconstruction of our industry we should leave the European Union.
7. There is no, or negligible British presence in whole areas of manufacture now, we are forced to buy foreign made products. The Government should organise the start up of import replacement industries.
8. Other first world countries, including the main European ones, have not let their industries decline and fall into foreign ownership like we have. Germany has three major, successful, indigenous motor companies, BMW, Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen plus the main European plants of Ford and General Motors plus they own and control Chrysler, the USA's third largest car manufacturer and our two most prestigious marques, Bentley and Rolls Royce. Finland, France, Italy and Germany still have the capability to build giant cruise liners as we once did. Italy's motorcycle industry didn't collaps like ours. It is almost impossible to buy electronic goods, computer equipment, office equipment, photographic equipment or almost any other sort of equipment that originates in this country. No other first world country denigrates manufacturing industries such as vehicle and ship building as low tech., smoke stack industries, neither of these is far behind aircraft manufacture in complexity or technological sophistication. Our aerospace industry is a shadow of what it once was. Tony Blair spouts about making Britain the high tech. capital of Europe, he must be joking, we have fallen behind countries like South Korea and Taiwan in technical capability thanks to the ignorance and incompetence of successive governments. We have been governed primarily by lawyers and a right mess they have made of it.
9. Education, education, education says the Prime Minister. For what? We are now a nation of shop and warehouse workers, call-centre staffers, semi-skilled workers for foreign owned companies and such like, there is hardly anywhere left in this country where an educated person can get worthwhile work.
10. The export of most of our manufacturing capability to the East, particularly China, is dangerous for our future. As China advances we are in danger of regressing to Third World status, unable to make anything for ourselves. A way must be found to recover our manufacturing capability.

1. Restraining the obscene rewards paid to "entrepreneurs", "executives", "businessmen", "financial manipulators", "medics", "lawyers" etc. should encourage more young people to take up careers in productive industries and so strengthen them.
2. The education system will be altered to provide incentives for people to study technical subjects rather than easy, soft, non wealth producing subjects.
3. The development of advanced manufacturing techniques to offset the advantage possessed by cheap foreign labour will be encouraged.
4. New companies will be formed and supported where import substitution is desirable.

1. The government is now doing it's best to destroy one of our few remaining high tech. companies of any size. They are bloody vandals, they should be trying to solve the problems of British Aerospace not aggravate them.
2. Our industry is being systematically wrecked and sold off to foreigners by successive imbecile governments, it looks as though BAe has been earmarked as the next to be thrown away, probably to the Americans.
3. Yesterday it was announced on the news that GCSE courses in engineering and manufacturing technology are to be introduced. Great, but why wasn't it done decades ago when we had a substantial manufacturing industry? It is probably too late now, the little manufacturing that remains is all likely to be hoovered up by the Chinese in the next few years. Our Minister of Technology, the grocer, Mr.Sainsbury said just a few weeks ago that there is no future for manufacturing in this country, we can't compete with China's low wages. He said our future lays with our design and innovation skills or something to that effect. He is suffering from the delusion that is common in this country, that we invent, design, develop or discover everything that is new and brilliant and that nobody else can. It is absolute nonsense, we are an also-ran in most technical fields these days, it is unlikely that we have or ever had any particular talents that other nationalities don't have and, in any case, design and innovation without manufacture doesn't produce much income. China has probably already left us behind technologically, it is preparing to launch astronauts into space and is building semiconductor manufacturing plants as though there were no tomorrow, it can afford to invest in high tech. ventures, it doesn't have an army of overpaid, non-productive parasites to support like we do.
4. The China problem is so acute, drastic measures have to be considered. Can an adherence to the doctrine of free trade be maintained? Is it necessary to pull up the drawbridge and isolate ourselves from the Far Eastern economies in order to preserve our own?
5. Could it be done?
6. Is Chinese growth being financed by the developed countries?
7. Are they obtaining large profits from it at the same time that their own industry is collapsing.
8. Does this country have large investments in China?
9. Who owns/benefits from them? (The fat, rabid rats I expect.)
10. Is it the people whose own manufacturing operations are collapsing?
11. Who is losing out, the displaced workers?
12. What is the final outcome likely to be, a strong, prosperous, capable China and a weak, poor, incapacitated western world that briefly prospered at Chinese expense then collapsed completely?
13. Most of the crown jewels of British industry have been sold off to foreign owners at great financial benefit to the "businessmen" who organised the sale but great detriment to everybody else.
14. Manufacturing industry should be given more support. Many people get a lot of satisfaction from designing and making things, opportunities for doing this sort of work are disappearing fast in this country.
15. We are in danger of becoming a third world state, one without the skills to make or do anything.
16. It is no good trying to preserve design capability in this country if manufacture is exported to low wage economies overseas, it isn't possible to produce good designs without knowing in detail how they will be manufactured.
17. The other highly industrialised countries haven't let their manufacturing industry decline to the extent that we have, if at all. Germany, Italy and France all still have major car manufacturers. The Italian motorcycle industry didn't collapse in the face of Japanese competition like it's British counterpart, the Ducati, Moto Guzzi, MV Agusta, Benelli, Gilera, Vespa brands are still alive? and some appear to be thriving. France, Italy, Germany? and Finland all still build large cruise liners and presumably other types of ship whereas our few remaining yards seem to be only kept just about alive by occasional MoD orders. These industries are denigrated as low-tech, smokestack industries but they are nothing of the sort, they are almost as high tech as it is possible to get. In any case, we are no more successful in industries that are acknowledged to be high-tech. British manufacturers have been all but wiped out in the consumer electronics field, a field which is widely acknowledged by industry insiders to be more advanced than defence electronics. In almost every defence field we are probably at least a decade behind the USA. About the only computer software we don't import from the United States is bespoke stuff for the gamblers in The City.
18. Britain is becoming a nation of shop, warehouse, fast-food joint and telesales workers; this isn't the career most people aspire to but it will soon be the only one available to most of our population.
19. When foreign controlled companies close down factories in this country the Government should take them over and seek to keep them going in some form.
20. Foreign controlled companies are taking over ours so that they can close them down and remove competition.
21. The Government must be able to interfere in the management of companies when they are failing.
22. The Government must set up import substitution businesses. There are no British manufacturers of an enormous range of products now, we are forced to buy foreign made products. Whole areas of manufacturing are closed to us because we have no capability in key areas. For example, we have no company making quality lenses (except on a very small scale perhaps) so Japan is able to monopolise the manufacture of almost every sort of camera, copiers, scanners, semiconductor manufacturing photo-lithographic machines etc. etc. and has been able to take a leading role in the micro-electronics industry leaving us more or less nowhere.
23. Our manufacturing industry cannot be successful because each productive worker effectively has to support several unproductive parasites?
24. The structure of our economy is a recipe for disaster?
25. Dyson is to move much of it's production to the Far East because in Malaysia it can employ workers at £1.50/hr in place of workers in this country who cost £11.50/hr. What hope is there for design, development and manufacturing work in this country, (design and development generally follows manufacturing quite quickly, ie. Japan, Taiwan).
26. Successive governments have presided over the wipe-out of our industry. About the only work available now for the bulk of the workforce is in the low paid retail, warehouse and clerking fields.
27. The reason Britain generally has lower productivity than other developed countries is because such a large proportion of the workforce consists of unproductive parasites. As many of these parasites are also grossly overpaid, the manufacturing workforce, in trying not to slip too far behind in this respect, prices itself out of most markets.
28. The Government ought to create and nurture import substitution industries where it is desirable, whatever the rules of organisations like the EU and GATT.
29. We shouldn't be forced to buy foreign products because there is no comparable British product on the market, as we are being forced to do in more and more cases. British workers want worthwhile jobs, we don't all want to be salesmen for foreign producers.
30. We are getting an unbalanced economy, advanced design work is being done in this country but nearly all the manufacturing is done overseas. Some of our designers are doing very nicely thank-you and are providing a lot of foreigners with work but this is at the expense of the less able members of our own workforce. Overall, it is foreign countries that make most money from our designer's work, the total employment and income from manufacture is far greater than that from design and it is more widely and fairly spread. The clever people in this country are providing our foreign competitors with work and income, rather than their own people, because it is more profitable for them. Very soon the foreign manufacturers will have trained their own designers and won't need the services of ours, as has happened in Japan, South Korea etc., so our designers are also likely to find themselves redundant and this country will have lost all it's design and manufacturing capability. We will be sliding even more rapidly towards third world status. Research, development and design only bring in a tiny income and keep a tiny number of people employed compared with manufacture.
31. How have Taiwan, South Korea and the other Asian Tigers obtained such a large share of high tech. semiconductor manufacturing when we have so little?
32. In general, individuals cannot plug the holes in our technical and manufacturing capabilities, there aren't enough willing to take the risk of ruining themselves. Entrepreneurs only back low risk or very high gain ventures.
33. A large section of our workforce is employed in a largely futile effort to try to cope with the damage done by lack of attractive and rewarding employment opportunities and consequent poverty, ie. in the benefits, psychiatric and welfare fields.

1. It is the people of other countries who benefit most from the science and technology developed in this country because it is uneconomic to make anything here now.
2. The people who do the most vital part of advancing our civilisation and the most difficult work, ie. scientists and technologists, are among the worst paid and in the most precarious employment position. People who do work that requires negligible knowledge, ability or integrity, ie. salesmen and businessmen are among the highest paid. It is no wonder this country is going rapidly downhill.
3. Only Britain would have a grocer, Lord Sainsbury, as it's Minister for Science and Innovation.

1. In a recent White Paper? the government rejected investment in research into thermonuclear energy generation, apparently on the grounds that it would be a dirty, polluting technology. In the past it has always been presented as a source of unlimited amounts of clean energy, why the change? If thermonuclear power generation is now rejected, what on earth is going to take the place of oil when it runs out. The future looks bleak.
2. Fission nuclear technology needs to be kept alive in this country in case it becomes essential in the future. Work in this field, including building plant, needs to carry on at a low level so that people with the necessary expertise continue to be available and in case a breakthrough can be made, (in the disposal of nuclear waste for example).
3. The reactors used in nuclear submarines must be very compact, can't power station reactors be made much smaller so that they can be built on production lines in factories rather than on site, which seems to be very expensive? Small reactors should be easier to dispose of at the end of their life shouldn't they?
4. Would floating power stations have advantages? Could they be designed so that flooding would provide an emergency cooling system if the primary one failed? Could they be towed to and sunk in a deep ocean trench if they suffered a major problem or would this make them a worse hazard?
5. Are fast breeder reactors the way to go because they make much better use of the fuel or are they too complicated, expensive or dangerous? Do they have to be larger than conventional reactors?
6. Finding a way of producing power from nuclear fusion seems to be the most important problem facing the human race, far more important than space exploration (which it might facilitate greatly), yet it doesn't seem to be treated with much urgency, why?
7. France generates 80%? of it's electricity from nuclear power compared to our 20%, is this one of the reasons why France seems to be more successful than Britain these days?
8. Overall, does the nuclear industry create more radioactive material or does it use it up, ie. does the radioactive waste produced have a larger tonnage than the original uranium ore from which it derives?
9. Does it create radioactive materials that are more dangerous because they have longer half-lives, shorter half-lives, are more radioactive, more toxic, more soluble in water or what?
10. Why can't radioactive waste be diluted with other waste and put back into exhausted uranium mines?
11. An article in Scientific American ( ) gave details of interesting new developments in fission reactor design.

1. Unemployed engineers should be able to spend short periods at firms of their choice to find out whether there is any way they can make themselves useful. The government should pay them a reasonable wage while they are doing this. This sort of arrangement could be useful for other occupations as well.
2. Engineers have to be content to be subordinates even when working in their own industry.
3. Engineering is becoming a closed shop for academics at the same time that it is going rapidly down the tubes, is there a link? What have these academics achieved in the last few decades while foreign companies have been wiping the floor with British companies.
4. No proper provision is made for retraining engineers who work in fast developing fields like electronics.
5. Qualified people should have more freedom to move from company to company and work for several different companies at the same time. The present set up stifles most people's initiative and creativity.
6. The Patent System is clogged up with worthless, trivial garbage. This stuff should be shunted straight on to a "heap" where it can be picked over by "vagrants" with nothing better to do and won't waste the time of those doing searches etc. Patents and patent applications should be classified according to their estimated or actual importance and value so that people wishing to do a quick, economical search can confine it to the material they really need to search. The classifications would change to some extent with time.