BRUSSELS -- Britain's exclusion from the single European currency and the resulting high pound has led to a bleeding away of jobs in manufacturing. Day by day, the press publishes the casualty figures as stories of closures, amalgamations and redundancies, for in manufacturing the high pound is a weakness and the low euro a strength. The only advantage to workers is cheap foreign holidays on their redundancy pay. For every one step forward there are two steps back, as divisions and companies in Britain lose the battle to compete within and between European industrial conglomerates.
The vast majority of companies concerned make it clear they have no future plans for further investing in Britain. If anything, current investment will percolate away in incremental restructurings. In the motor sector, for example, Rover and Ford have closed factories. Nissan is slimming, and Honda in Swindon, our last success story with an announced 400 million pound investment last year, announced last week that it now believed they made a mistake. Now they are downsizing their plans and sharply increasing European, as opposed to British, content in their vehicles produced in Britain. Mazda is currently looking for a European production facility. They are looking both at sites in the European Union and among the vanguard for future membership. The only country excluded from consideration is Britain.
This collapse is contributing to the deterioration of the skills of Britain's labor force as the current generation, once no longer working in manufacturing, rapidly lose touch with the forward march of process innovation. In two short years, their craft skills have been marooned in the technological past. The situation is even worse for the coming generation, whose career choices are distorted by a chronic lack of good science teachers. This situation is exacerbated by a cultural dichotomy that presents itself either as endorsing the "get rich quick" mentality of much of the e-generation or woolly minded environmentalism, neither of which relates to today's electromechanical or tomorrow's biotech world.