How prescient is this quote from Bill Bryson's
Notes From a Small Island? "...When a nation's industrial prowess has plunged so low that it is reliant on Korean firms for its future economic security, then perhaps it is time to re-dress one's educational priorities and maybe give a little thought to what's going to put some food on the table in about 2010." Oh, if only a few politicians had read that. Second thoughts, they probably did and ignored it anyway.
"
Notes From A Small Island" is a hilarious account of
Bryson's adventures travelling across England in the 80s. In the chapter which inspired the above observation he has arrived in Oxford, befuddled by that town's obsessive academia. Discussing "post-Kantian aesthetics", he suggests, is not going to help a country which relies on foreign companies to employ British workers on British turf. He is talking about the new Samsung factory which had just opened in Tyneside and which was to provide 800 jobs for British workers at a time when unemployment was at record levels. Like many at the time, Bryson accurately predicted that this was the beginning of the end.
This current economic crisis is not the fault of the previous Labour government under Brown and Darling, but the long-standing industrial policy begun by 80s Thatcherism which destroyed British manufacturing and handed the vacant lot to foreign investors. Having reduced manufacturing in the UK to an insignificance, mighty powers were then handed to the money men in the City who proceeded to invent countless ways of making money without actually producing anything.
Many experts could see, even at its conception, that this policy was bound to end in tears for the majority of decent, hard-working people. The "good news" is it has provided the perfect opportunity for hundreds, if not thousands, of unscrupulous speculators to step forth and make millions, if not billions. The bad news is that the greed-mania this culture produced has brought the world to the brink of depression and condemned millions to working long years into retirement on low pay.
Bryson, like other pundits, saw the importance of making stuff at home. It is a shame that we are now so far from that world of "buying British" that we take it for granted most of the goods we bring home will have been produced in some far flung land. Now this trend is crystallising in the ascendancy of Chinese manufacturing. Politicians and economists cannot agree on what the long term fallout will be of handing so much of our trade to China. Word of note: one of the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire was obsessive trading with the east. Who says history doesn't repeat itself?
Milton Johanides is a retired businessman, church elder, writer and artist. He has been featured on BBC TVs Songs of Praise, owned numerous art galleries and once ran an award winning picture framing business in Scotland. The views expressed in these articles are his own. email: miltonjohanides@yahoo.co.uk
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. Bryson uses the medium of his own home in Norfolk to provide an idiosyncratic and irreverent commentary on proto-Victorian mores and morals.