Good point. Don't blame the Russians for everything. At least they are up front about their dislikes. Our good friend the USA wanted us bankrupt and leapt at the chance during WW2. Knock us off our pedestal. Of course we'll help you brother, just give us shed loads of cash for the material you want. And we being the upright citizen paid it off until the 1990's, IIRC.

Wonder why they are flipping off now. Elephantine memories?

Whilst BT do provide investment in the UK infrastructure, they also manage to truly p off very long standing customers with un-necessary billing for phones that you paid off many years ago. My father was being charged £16 a quarter for a jack diddly squat very basic phone service. Just like good old British Gas who will not move on their inflated prices.

If these companies treated long standing customers with respect (my father was with BT and British Gas for 50 years!), adjust their prices due to competition (or shock horror suggest moving to a better tariff :eek:) and not like sheep who will blindly observe their patriotic duty to stay with them, they may not be hemorrhaging the numbers of customers they currently are.

QED. :}

Do we not see here the reasons we no longer have a car industry, even though we like to blame everyone but ourselves?

We now have (and have had for a few decades) a situation where the masses have turned critics and most of the populus pursue their pathetic little agendas instead of worrying about the bigger picture and the common good. The result is that the once great industrial base is being eroded day-by-day because someone can buy a non-UK manufactured product for 50p cheaper due to strategic pricing by those who will simply walk away when it suits in the interest of pure profit.

I suspect this message will not win me any new friends here, but as I said in my earlier post, it is all the making of ourselves collectively and no one else.

She didn’t help most certainly!

But politicians are politicians and whatever the colour - they usually make a pigs ear out of things.

To my mind it was Benn and Wilson who cemented the demise of the U.K. car industry by their belligerent insistence that BMH and Leyland merge.

Tony Benn in particular was guilty IMO - of bizarre swively eyed lunacy on a regular basis. Even Harold Wilson described him as becoming more immature with age.

After 66 years on this planet - with 50 of them being intensely interested in our politicians stupidity - I am just as bemused and suffer the same despair now as I did as a young adult.

I had hoped that the then Labour government would have saved Rover from going to the wall, but sadly they didn't seem interested.

Our lorry manufacturing industry went the same way as our car industry too. Many once familiar names now history. :getmecoat:

I remember Tony Blair wanted to save Rover, it was Gordon Brown who pulled the plug. :mad:

Funny how the title "Engineer" is revered in many countries as highly as "Doctor", but is ignored in the UK, despite our great industrial heritage...

Yes - surprising that - especially as he (Gordon Brown) went on to bail out the Banks in 2008 after a decade of inept regulation by his “Super Regulator” the FSA.

He effectively designed and set up the FSA against the advice of those around him and combined elements of the effective tripartite BoE, DTI and the old PIA.

In doing so we lost the specialist expert knowledge of each third of the tripartite Regulatory System and shoved all the responsibility onto inexperienced people all under one roof so everyone kept quiet about the coming storm.

Gordon Brown saved the Banks because not to do so would underline the abject failure of something he was entirely responsible for.

So we all suffered the consequences of his ego.

His justification was that the “Banks were too big to fail”.

IMO he really felt that it was his ego that could not take the hit. So he made the entire population of the U.K. pay.

With a succession of idiots like this in charge of No 10 and No 11 - what chance did a vehicle manufacturer stand?

NEWS FLASH!

It’s just been announced that HS2 is likely to be cancelled!

So all the disruption- the compulsory purchase of property for way less than market value - has it all been for nought? :duh:

Yes - Germany being an excellent example. There, a person has to have a minimum set of relevant engineering qualifications, experience and accreditation to professional bodies in order to call him/her self an Engineer.

But, we must not overlook the importance of our engineers. Every year, an engineer from a local business visits my house and does an excellent job of sucking the entire content of the septic tank with a big hosepipe connected to his truck.

Yes - strange that we celebrate the likes of Brunel and show him off to the world during the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games when we normally ignore our achievements at best or more usually decry them as somehow “wrong”.

How odd that some revere a young 16 year old girl for putting herself and others at considerable extra risk by crossing the Atlantic in a Sail Boat rather than do what most people do and fly?

Virtue Signalling as its best and most bizarre. Especially as it’s been revealed now that by saving her one air journey, the crew have had to make FOUR flights over the Atlantic! :duh:

Two new crew members flew out from the U.K. to sail the boat back and two who crewed on the way over have flown back from the US.

Barmy.

Slightly off thread but I when a British company moves into foreign ownership I reckon it should change its name accordingly.
British Airways
British Airports Authority
Thames Water
Scottish Power
National Grid
Royal Mail
etc etc should all be prefixed with the country that owns them and received the profits.
Would also be nice if every time a Union Flag was displayed on a product it was accompanied by a bit of text saying "The Union Flag is a trade mark of the United Kingdom and has been licensed to Acme Industries Inc (or whoever) of China (or wherever). It does not indicate where this product was produced.