Saturday 2 July 2011

Carswell at Frinton

My attention was caught by three posts today; Up Pompeii; The Anger of A Quiet Man and UKK41 - all of which have the common thread of demonstrating the stupidity of this nation's membership of the European Union. At the heart of our problems within our nation state is one group of our society, summed up by UP in a most succint manner thus:
".....there is at present living within this country a group of people who appear to be hell bent upon overseeing it's demise, they too are engineers - engineers of destruction - they go by the collective name of "politicians"....."
It has to be borne in mind that when discussing transport of any form, the Trans European Network - Transport (TEN-T) has to be considered in the equation, together with other EU requirements regarding tendering of contracts - and on the subject of TEN-T readers may wish to refer to this summation.

Up Pompeii's main thrust is the decline of our manufacturing industry and it is worth noting that this decline accelerated under the premierships of both Blair and Brown - as reported in 2009 by the Mail who based their article on figures from the ONS. Back even further, in 2002, the BBC was reporting decline and one comment from Tim Congdon in that report is worth repeating:
"Britain is a rich country - we don't want to do repetitive things with our hands," says Professor Tim Congdon, chief economist at Lombard Street Research. "We should do unique and specialised tasks requiring the use of our brains."
If manufacturing once accounted for almost 40% of the UK's output, and in 2002 now represented less than half that; if manufacturing had declined steadily over the past 30 years, giving way to competition from abroad, particularly the Far East where labour was much cheaper; if UK manufacturers paid a lathe operator £4.50/£4.75 per hour whereas in China they were paid £0.40; and if some economists argued that manufacturing in the UK was no longer a viable proposition, how come our politicians failed to spot and rectify this little problem?

The Anger of a Quiet Man posts about the fact that in his opinion the problem with race that we have in this country is not due to immigration, but to integration. As I have commented, whilst accepting his views, the problem most definitely is due to immigration as it is impossible to deal with the latter until strict border controls are in place to deal with the former, thus preventing yet more immigrants arriving and thus compounding the problem . I would refer back to my post castigating Iain Duncan Smith in this regard as due to politician's subservience to the European Union no politician is able to do anything to counter these two problems.

UKK41 posts on yet another undemocratic aspect of the European Union, focussing on the European Citizen's Initiative and also writes:
"The Lisbon Treaty, the replacement for the proposed and failed EU Constitution, was only voted on by a few people in Ireland – and they were bullied and blackmailed into voting until they obtained the correct response. We are paying billions in taxes to set up departments brought about by the signing of the Lisbon Treaty; we are paying for something we haven’t had any say in. It seems to me that the democratic castle of the Lisbon Treaty was built on some pretty undemocratic sand".
Hang on, I hear readers cry, what the hell as Carswell got to do with this? Well you see, it would appear that, in common with most politicans, Carswell was passing judgement on the wrong sand castles in the wrong place.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

The problem is not one of race but one of culture. Immigration of people who share to some degree our culture, will over time, adjust and integrate. Then there are others whose cultural norms are so different that even the doctrine of MC will not be able to integrate, as these people are not here to integrate but to conquer and subjugate.

When this happens on a colossal scale, all the ingredients and the matchbox are present. All it requires is the first strike.

So in a way, it is good that manufacturing industry is all but dead in the UK, as there is much less infrastructure to burn and destroy.

Anonymous said...

"Britain is a rich country - we don't want to do repetitive things with our hands," says Professor Tim Congdon, chief economist at Lombard Street Research. "We should do unique and specialised tasks requiring the use of our brains."

This statement is obviously by a person who does not know the first thing about manufacturing, large-scale engineering and engineering excellence.

Britain was an inventive nation because it is where large-scale engineering and manufacture first began. It is where the first problems of engineering were encountered, and minds set about solving the problems - engineering and scientific. This is known as invention. But first one has to have an industrial and engineering base, and only then one encounters problems of efficiency, materials, of structure, and others such, before one can solve the problem, and thus be inventive. In short - "necessity is the mother of invention".

As an example, Britain was the first to design and build a commercial jet plane. What no one knew or even dreamt of was that continued recycling of the airframe between large temperature and pressure ranges would lead to even a well manufactured alloy to get "tired". Therefore not just engineering design had to invent stuff to counter this, but it led to a fundamental re-think of the nature of compounds i.e., physical chemistry.

Britain not just dominated the world in manufacturing industry but also in science and inventions. All these three go together. Destroy the base i.e., manufacturing, and along it will go science and invention.

It will take at least three generations to set right what has been so blithely destroyed, mainly because buffoons were put in charge of the ship of state.

WitteringsfromWitney said...

DP111: Good first comment and can but agree.

On the second comment: first, I do know Tim Congdon and he does have the odd good idea or two......

Second, whislt accepting your comment on our history of manufacturing, my point was more about not whether the comment by economists was correct or not, but why did our political elite at that time not investigate, agree or disagree, or change policy........?

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

WW

I'm absolutely seething with rage at what was done to the manufacturing and engineering base of the UK. No country has had such a base, and no country has been as careless, to the bounds of criminality, in destroying it.

I take my hat off to Germany. Germany could have destroyed its industrial base as a token of atonement for WWII. Did it? Heck it did. Germany is now the preeminent industrial power of the world, outstripping by orders of magnitude that of China.

By 2002, when Congdon made the remark, the die was cast- Britain had already past the point of no return, as the skilled technical base of the UK was retired, made redundant, or on the point of retiring. There was no continuity from the apprentice to the skilled senior machinist. You cant import that continuous line by immigration. Once you destroy the line, it stays destroyed.

My point was that when the manufacturing base is gone, there is nothing for inventors, engineers and skilled technicians, to get their teeth into. Congdon assumes that the inventiveness is part of the innate nature of a group.

------------

Fairly similar topic here

http://raedwald.blogspot.com/2011/07/its-immigration-innit.html

WitteringsfromWitney said...

DP111 On further reflection, you're right!