Care to explain with evidence, rather than a meaningless throwaway one liner and emoticon?


While you're at it, maybe you could elaborate on why a Grammar school girl who forced her way to the top job in the country would wish to ensure the Establishment would be unchanged.............

What's amazing in the aftermath of the Thatcher government is that the Old Etonians have taken control again as though she never existed and yet they use her memory to oppress the plebs much more than they were pre-Thatcher. Shows the "Establishment" is much more adaptive and intelligent than the leaders of the Labour "movement".

This is partially true (though some of the changes that Thatcher made cannot be undone). It's a very sad state of affairs too.

For adaptive and intelligent substitute devious and lying.

marrying a millionaire helped

You are not making any sense. Rolls Royce doesn't have comparable competitors in Germany, France and Italy making aero engines in terms of the value they add to manufacturing economy. Therefore in order for these countries to be ahead of ours on output they have to get it from other sources of manufacturing. And you have to have your head buried deep in the sand not to see this is plainly true given they are, as I pointed out, much stronger in other areas such as rolling stock manufacture.



No it shows you don't know what the term "gross value added" means.

It is a measure of revenue that takes into account subsidies and wages. It is NOT a measure of actual physical output. That is why this:

"(Britain is) 9th in terms of manufacturing output (value added) at $231 billion, behind the USA, China, Japan, Germany, Italy and France."

Doesn't contradict what you quoted which was this:

"108th in terms of manufacturing output as a share of gross value added (11%), marginally ahead of France but behind most major developed countries."

Because they are different statistics. In terms of output we ARE behind Germany, Italy and France because that is what the first one of those two stats tells you.

BBC R1 pull the song.

Wrong decision. It's there on merit, whatever your view on Mrs T. The great Lady herself would not have agreed with this decision.

the value you add is the value you add. that's it. why are you insisting on cherry picking what should and shouldn't be included. so what if we don't manufacture as much rolling stock as them?

this statement is clearly crap.

in fact, the only thing your stats show, is how the labour party destroyed british industry.

I am sure you understood the meaning. BMW and VW are German owned companies and so any outposts here such as Mini are always at risk of losing out to German domestic concerns. The state of Lower Saxony owns something like 12% of VW and despite the "Volkswagon Law" being declared illegal the share ownership structure is such it isn't going to be taken over by a foreign company or dismantled.

In France Renault (which is associated with Nissan) was built up by the French government rather than allowed to go bust as our domestically owned car manufacturing base was. Companies like VW and Renault are German and French in an economic sense far more than any company in the UK involved in large scale volume manufacture is British these days.

So while companies like Nissan and Toyota contribute to our manufacturing output the fact they are foreign owned can't be shrugged off as just merely the product of globalisation because countries such as France, Germany (and Italy with Fiat) view the domestic ownership of such industries as important pillars of their economies.

but here's the thing, this thread has several posts about how thatcher destroyed uk industry. yet you link to a piece that proves otherwise.
in 1970, we were ranked 5th, by 1980 down to 7th yet by 1990 up to 6th and by 2000, 5th and now we're 9th. there's only one party who's destroyed british industry. and it certainly wasn't thatcher.