Stirling in crisis

Despite enormous efforts by the government of Gordon Brown to prove otherwise , Britain is beset by TWO distinct crises.

First there is the financial crisis which is affecting most but not all industrial countries and which has its origin in the major world banks. Second there is the economic crisis, which is made worse by the financial crisis in Britain, but is quite distinct from it.

In other words even if the banks were operating normally, Britain would still have to deal with an economic crisis entirely of its own making. This crisis arises from the running down of both our manufacturing sector and successive governments’ failure to provide against the entirely predictable exhaustion of our indigenous oil and gas resources.

The present Labour government has been in power for nearly 12 years. From the beginning of this period these two main components of the UK economic crisis have been fully visible, as this writer has expressed it in diverse national publications over this period and in the 18 years of  previous Conservative rule.

Why is manufacturing so important to a country like Britain? Basically because two-thirds of the world’s exports are in tangible goods. Because of the size of our population we cannot expect to find non-manufacturing niche markets capable of paying for the vast range of products which our population has an appetite for.

We HAVE therefore to engage in full-scale competition with other industrialized countries like Germany, France and the USA , for any and all export markets, and in an era of virtually zero tariffs  we have to FIGHT for our own home market too.

There is no hiding from this simple numerical reality. The one possible gain from the banking crisis is possibly to make this clear to our domestic politicians.

 Email this article