Guys,
The post was about the seemingly gleeful de-industrialisation of one of the industrial heartlands of the UK & the unstinting one- dimensional Political & Social solution of building 1000s of "Micky-mouse" homes in their place..... which also just tied in with the fact that on my visit, to Central Lancashire I got back from my Father, a book I had previously lent him... Bert Hopwood's "Whatever Happened to the BMI.".. about the Motorcycle Industry & Birmingham/Coventry/Woolwich e.t.c for a re-read.
John Bloor, (the owner of Triumph), is developing houses there @Euxton/Leyland/ Buckshaw, as he previously did on numerous sites elsewhere & famously @ Meriden. When he bought the old Triumph factory. The story goes, he got the Manufacturing Rights to the Triumph name on purchasing the site & whether he loved motorcycles or not, I do not know, but probably for commercial reasons he started manufacturing new Triumph motorcycles in 1991& in so far as I can assess a lot of enthusiasts are grateful on this account. He just happens to be one of the speculators/developers @ present on the site.
The World has changed, of that there is no doubt, but the people responsible for most of the major upsets in this part of the World/Europe, have I believe in the main, had the same coloured face as I have, through introducing misguided policies & short-term solutions to the problems we are facing.
If you look behind the policies of many industries the drive perhaps through stiff competition & then later on Globalisation, has been to de-skill the workforce, from Henry Ford onwards.. thus/therefore limiting the potential earnings people could receive in re-numeration. If you then apply this to the less than thoughtful destruction of our Industrial manufacturing sector in the past, of which other factors too were partially to blame, poor Management, Consultancy Syndrome, radicalised Unions, poor under-capitalised plant, inflation, Investor/Share-holder returns, spiralling land values, Speculators greed, Computerisation e.t.c. you are left with an employment model that inevitably leads to an increase in many non-essential posts in mid-tier level, the downsizing of productive employees & a reduced wage structure for many as their tasks are inevitably semi-skilled & low skilled operations.
Probably it could have been different for the UK, if sufficient revenue from taxes & North Sea oil had been ear-marked for training & bringing forward a technical revolution in manufacturing that started to happen in the late 80s & 90s on a greater scale elsewhere.
Politicians in the main, strive to maintain the Status Quo, when the felt that the Financial Sector could foot the Nations bill, it was unbridled & other sectors were forgotten or left to the mercy of Financial policies of, the way to go was whatever gave the greatest numerical return to the few involved. Money & power now gravitates to a smaller & smaller section of society, surely this is the core problem of the Nation/World?
Even my Schoolboy lessons in Economics stated that you needed to make goods & export products to maintain a good balance of payments, no Eton or Harrow involved here!
Lastly, having worked in Turkey 4 years ago & being left stranded by an airline, I made my way back to Blighty by train, coach & foot having only a moderate amount of £s in my back pocket.
In Frankfurt being short of the required full fee to get train to Cologne, in the rain, I approached a group of Muslim taxi drivers & asked if anyone wanted to buy my leather jacket for the Euro equivalent of £18, they retired and then asked me why I needed the money, so I told them, 5 minutes later, their leader went down the Taxi rank & came back with more than I required & told me that it was not right for a man to sell his jacket in such bad weather & to take the money with their best wishes to continue my journey! I am eternally grateful to them & continued to Cologne where my Employers could wired some money to me.
No white faces helped me that day, things may be difficult in relationships between different groups, but in my experience, race is only a barrier when you make it so & the collective situation is often very different on individual level.
I realised a long time ago on this site that if I had "haved" a foreign sounding name I probably wouldn't have got any or many replies.
I was hoping for some comments on the demise of our much beloved dysfunctional industry..perhaps from someone who worked there or some long-term good solutions to our Industrial decline!
JBW
