I expect like me, you have been listening to the pundits and politicians with ever decreasing belief that they know where they are going and what is best for us. The level of disagreement I find frightening, and the problem is that they take their values from just a short base, instead of realising that the problems really started many years ago. They talk about improving manufacture, what they mean is finding a few more jobs, not to getting us back to where we were 20 years ago, then manufacturing so many items of considerable expense that we now have to buy from abroad. What they don’t seem to see is a large proportion of the populous has a totally new way of life than in the past. Their eating habits are more expensive, because so much of it is pre-packed. The throwaway society is making inroads into the economy when you can buy a piece of furniture costing several hundred pounds, and after a couple of years nobody wants it. It would not be so bad if the furniture was manufactured in this country, and not giving people serious complaints in their backs. If you can be bothered, cast your mind around the significant purchasers you have made in the last year, and try to judge if any of them were made in this country. We are told that almost every house now has a computer, and we know where they are made, certainly not in this country. The same applies to cars, gardening equipment, clothing to a great extent, and then there are all these call centres springing up in the East and the Subcontinent, that are staffed with people who are not technically skilled but merely answering a set of questions, with standard answers, and if you ask something slightly more complicated, you get no help whatsoever. It was not like this in the old days, the telephone people, then, were keen to help you, now is a matter of how cheaply you can offer a half baked service and can get by. Those call centres should all be in Britain. If you are an inventor and someone takes an interest in new product the chances are it will be manufactured at the Far East. If an entrepreneur decides to come up with a new product and gets it manufactured abroad, he alone will be the beneficiary of the greater part of the savings, not those who are purchasing the articles, or the government.
I can’t understand why the government, who allegedly has very bright people within its t ranks, and presumably who understand basic economics, and must be aware that you can’t spend what you have not earned. When the government talks about borrowing in quantities that I simply can’t imagine, without some change in policy I can’t see how we can pay it back. It would be nice if one of the senior members of Parliament explained how we can get out of this mess, without manufacturing. I travel a lot now in taxis, having given up my car, and I find that all the taxis are of foreign manufacture, and the drivers are despondent not only for themselves but their children