Helpful myth debunker: UK manufacturing is twice the value it was after World War II.
The article also answers the obvious contextual question: how much has GDP increased in the same time frame / what is the trend manufacturing as a proportion of total output? The answer, manufacturing has shrunk to 12% of the economy from 50%, but this isn’t a fall in manufacturing, just slower growth relative to other sectors of the economy.
Interesting that manufacturing seems more volatile than the overall economy (15% drop vs 6%) so we couldn’t rely on a manufacturing-based economy to sort us out.
This is quite interesting. When you really need manufacturing (or resources, but we haven’t had much of those since the end of Empire) is now, i.e. when your currency has weakened substantially and the world is emerging from a recession (pace the double-dippers). Then you stand to gain substantially from an upturn in exports.
The services economy which we have in recent years depended on to drive growth will take longer to recover, and our manufacturing base is relatively small. Nice to know it isn’t in decline in absolute terms though!
Excellent use of QI. I heart faint praise!
More seriously, you are right about wanting some export earnings to feed into the economy following a recession.
There’s something going on in my head as well on the argument about static vs growth-based economies. While I can’t get my head around it properly, I have a feeling that we require growth in our economy only because everyone else does. It doesn’t seem necessary given a relatively stable population and assets.