Quote:
Originally Posted by mattr
Yup, but to expand (a little)
Yes, the labour party/unions stuffed it up good and proper in the 70s, Thatcher then leapt so far the other way, that even those companies who did have worthwhile products they could develop and sell suffered badly. Basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater (small baby, large bath).
Most/all other European countries give large scale tax breaks to R&D spend (some make it positively beneficial to spend cash on R&D). The Thatcher governments policies pretty much made it financial suicide to invest in R&D within the UK (compared to doing it in, say, Germany). So even the non-UK based companies moved work/R&D to other countries in Europe (and now to china, india and so on) or holding companies bailed out and sold off/closed down UK based companies to minimise exposure. Those remaining borderline/potentially successful UK based, UK owned businesses ended up with little/no chance in the European/Global market. And are now mostly owned by someone else. Or gone forever.
Unfortunately, successive governments since then have proceeded to do the same. So now there isn't much left to save.
Except, on the whole, the very very top end of the high cost/technology
market, where customers really will pay thro the nose for cutting edge knowledge based stuff. F1, Aerospace, Surface treatment, Composites and so on.
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Yes agreed but protectionism doesn't work, it is difficult to tailor legislation to allow "good" firms to prosper and "bad" firms to go under, especially when the "bad" outnumber the "good" by such wide margins and when we're thrown into the Common Market as it was then called.
Unfortunately when we are good we're the best in the world (F1 technology for example) when we're bad we're the worst.
Edit
And also what is hugely annoying and very important is that the part the general public played in this whole mess is totally and utterly ignored by all politicians because they are not brave enough to mention it.