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The UK by contrast has lost most car manufacturing leaving only a few foreign owned companies doing mostly assembly work. The UK is world class in creating barriers (eg: planning, nimbys, delays etc) to efficient investment in facilities which could compete.
This certainly is not the issue. Our planning system is producing cramped homes and town centres that are generally ugly. The country is filled with unattractive high-rise blocks build by the state. By contrast, our heritage town centres, which were often built by the well-off, were far more beautiful.
Britain once had strong manufacturing capability, but it lost it. The union leaders took the country down a path of industrial disputes. They did not protect their members’ jobs and they lacked commercial awareness. Many of the factory bosses, educated in private schools and trained in classical history, had little understanding of industry, engineering, or even the companies they were supposed to manage. The country lacked unity and was divided by class conflict.
In the 1970s the state propped up failing industries. Money was taken from the profit-generating parts of the economy and funnelled into industries that were failing, often staffed by people who were incompetent, disruptive, or who demanded more pay for less work.
Civil servants were left to run state enterprises, despite having classical educations rather than real-life experience in creating and managing businesses.
Today, being rich is often seen as shameful. People forget that Rolls Royce was founded through a partnership between an engineer and a wealthy investor. That no longer happens.
Today, anyone in Britain with money is seen as a cash cow, or is accused of being greedy simply for being rich. Too often, businesses are treated as providers of social services, as though workers are “owed” a living by their employer, rather than recognising employment as a mutually beneficial arrangement in which the business gains a return and the worker gains a job that allows him or her to provide for a family.
Socialist-minded workers are quick to demand a share of profits when a company is doing well, yet the same workers will not work for free when the company is in trouble. Why did n't the workers step in and work for free to save our manufacturing industries?
Britain has high taxation, which extracts money from the economy and puts it into the hands of the government. Inheritance tax, at 40 percent, makes the United Kingdom uncompetitive compared to other countries. In Australia the inheritance rate is 0%. As a result, in Britain wealth cannot easily be passed down through generations. How many British companies remain in the hands of the families that founded them? Increasingly, UK businesses are being bought up by foreign competitors.
We need an economy, where money meets good ideas.
I have known many business owners who sold up, retired, and simply became fed up with regulation. The world is changing rapidly with the internet and digital technology.
There are also too many people in jobs they are not good at. Musk was right to ask: “What did you get done this week?”
People need money to start and grow businesses, but taxation and redistribution are treated as solutions for equality rather than as barriers that discourage enterprise.
At the same time, many of today’s 20-year-olds are more interested in quick and easy money through financial trading or buying Bitcoin than in building industries or leaving a legacy. Chief executives are often focused on the next quarterly results instead of building companies for long-term growth, which in turn damages pensions. Ultimately taxes collection for the NHS. The London Stock Exchange is not performing well.
Where are the people with the talent and drive to open car plants? Britain, does not rich citizens.
Increasingly, we rely on overseas investors to build factories. If James Dyson built a car plant, he would be criticised, but if a foreign company opened a car plant in the UK, they would be welcomed with open arms. It seems perverse that we do not back our own citizens.
We are also sending too many people to university, even though the jobs simply do not exist.
Our colleges are producing people with mediocre talent.
The country does not have the leaders to change course.
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