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Old 21st August 2019, 22:06   #31
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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.
You have a point - I notice that the Vauxhall van adverts now state that Vauxhall is a “British Brand”. Which is interesting given which company now owns the brand.

Perhaps modern MG’s could be similarly advertised?
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Old 21st August 2019, 22:46   #32
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I am afraid that it is all academic what has continually happened to British Industry. Unfortunately, in my opinion, and after a working life of of various occupations, I honestly believe that it is down to the real lack of understanding of how to manage a firm, be it in manufacturing or elsewhere, by Managers/ owners of the company. Worked at a few companies that I wondered how they stopped in business. This is not down to one particular thing. There are many reasons. A few:- arrogance by managers who actually knew less about what their business entailed, than people who worked for them. Only interested in their ‘playthings’. Cars, boats, horses. You name it. Just a show of ‘this is how good my business is doing’. Three of those actual types of business folded after a few years of mismanaging what could have been an excellent company. Failure to sort out ‘ bad employee’ has occurred at two firms I worked at. I actually had a go at a particular such employee, and also warned the manager himself what was going on. Call me a tell tail if you like, I don’t mind trying to save my job. This company folded. One company I worked at, in waste transfer, the manager had a heart attack. Nothing to do with work stress we were told. We, the drivers and sales staff , worked this company for four months on our own because the owner could not get a manager to take the job on. We were actually told that we had made more profit during those four months than the corresponding period before.I could go on, but don’t want to write a book.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 06:56   #33
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I am afraid that it is all academic what has continually happened to British Industry. Unfortunately, in my opinion, and after a working life of of various occupations, I honestly believe that it is down to the real lack of understanding of how to manage a firm, be it in manufacturing or elsewhere, by Managers/ owners of the company. Worked at a few companies that I wondered how they stopped in business. This is not down to one particular thing. There are many reasons. A few:- arrogance by managers who actually knew less about what their business entailed, than people who worked for them. Only interested in their ‘playthings’. Cars, boats, horses. You name it. Just a show of ‘this is how good my business is doing’. Three of those actual types of business folded after a few years of mismanaging what could have been an excellent company. Failure to sort out ‘ bad employee’ has occurred at two firms I worked at. I actually had a go at a particular such employee, and also warned the manager himself what was going on. Call me a tell tail if you like, I don’t mind trying to save my job. This company folded. One company I worked at, in waste transfer, the manager had a heart attack. Nothing to do with work stress we were told. We, the drivers and sales staff , worked this company for four months on our own because the owner could not get a manager to take the job on. We were actually told that we had made more profit during those four months than the corresponding period before.I could go on, but don’t want to write a book.
May I suggest you do write that book. What you outline above resonates with my experience. Tho’ to be fair, whilst I clearly recognise many aspects of what you have set out, my experience of the Private Sector and the Public Sector was that the Public Sector was very much worse.

This was because despite monumental “Male Chicken ups” the Public Sector never had to worry about Profit. In fact - many of those in the Public Sector I worked with saw the very idea of “Profit” as akin to something you trod in.

There idea of “work” was meetings - lots of them, and with lots of people. It was normal to attend a meeting and the head guy would come in flanked by his assistant and a couple of his or her under managers - all of which had assistants to take notes - and then their would be me.

This series of meetings would go on for months and as often as not they would conclude that whatever it was was not a good idea and the notion would be scrapped.

Invariably the summary would be along the self justification lines of:-

“All these meetings have been a valuable use of time effort and resources because we now know what we are not going to do.”

I hope you do write a book - I’m writing mine.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 07:04   #34
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Originally Posted by SideValve View Post
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.
I like the idea. When BMC had 50% market share, customers knew it was a British company and patriotic sales were plentiful.
Today many of us would struggle to know who owns what. Talking to a RAC patrolman recently we discussed how many times ownership of it has changed since I left in 1993. As a result it spends a great deal of money modifying and adapting to the whims of its new owner. That can only be a waste of resources and not focusing on the business at hand.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 07:50   #35
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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.

I suspect it is because we the public would have punished the Labour party hard at the elections for "wasting public money" had they done so.

The majority of the population see support for industry as a waste of public resources. The banks, on the other hand, were different in that the individual interests of many would have been directly impacted had a few of the big banks been allowed to collapse.

I have read many people argue in the media that if a school is unable to work within the allocated budget, it should be allowed to collapse in the same way as "any other business". I suspect the same people would be complaining if their child was not getting the teaching that they believed he/she deserved.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 10:22   #36
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Hi Maninder. Whilst I agree in part with you, do you not think it would have cost us, the paying public, you and I, less, if the banks and their gambling houses, because that is what they are, had been ‘allowed’ to fail big time? How many of the millionaires who have piloted(crashed) in flames! working as the ‘big noise’ at the top of banking, have been made poorer by their incompetence? I cann’t think of one can you? I can remember reading an article some years ago, it was a biography, and the person made a comment, which went along the lines of ‘ if you are looking for thieves rogues and vagabonds, look no further than this house(by which I think he means parliament) and the banks. This was in the 19th century. Say no more. And they still try to fiddle their expenses. Well I never.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 10:28   #37
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I suspect it is because we the public would have punished the Labour party hard at the elections for "wasting public money" had they done so.

The majority of the population see support for industry as a waste of public resources. The banks, on the other hand, were different in that the individual interests of many would have been directly impacted had a few of the big banks been allowed to collapse.

I have read many people argue in the media that if a school is unable to work within the allocated budget, it should be allowed to collapse in the same way as "any other business". I suspect the same people would be complaining if their child was not getting the teaching that they believed he/she deserved.
Could not support British industry, but gave millions of £s to Japanese motor manufacturing companies to set up operations here. Conflict of interests perhaps?
Not enough ‘brown envelopes’ from British companies? Don’t know how I dare suggest it.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 11:27   #38
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Hi Maninder. Whilst I agree in part with you, do you not think it would have cost us, the paying public, you and I, less, if the banks and their gambling houses, because that is what they are, had been ‘allowed’ to fail big time? How many of the millionaires who have piloted(crashed) in flames! working as the ‘big noise’ at the top of banking, have been made poorer by their incompetence? I cann’t think of one can you? I can remember reading an article some years ago, it was a biography, and the person made a comment, which went along the lines of ‘ if you are looking for thieves rogues and vagabonds, look no further than this house(by which I think he means parliament) and the banks. This was in the 19th century. Say no more. And they still try to fiddle their expenses. Well I never.

Hi David - I was of course only saying how I believe it was/would have been and not that it was right for the UK or the population. Unfortunately, the UK considers the financial/banking sector to be far mot strategic than engineering and manufacturing which leads to the former sector being characterised by personal and institutional greed. As someone with engineering in his blood - spent whole life in engineering, brother a professional engineer, sister a STEM professional and both kids at uni studying engineering - in my opinion this is a sorry state of affairs.

But, we elect those who set the UK strategy....

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Could not support British industry, but gave millions of £s to Japanese motor manufacturing companies to set up operations here. Conflict of interests perhaps?
Not enough ‘brown envelopes’ from British companies? Don’t know how I dare suggest it.
I suspect most people in the UK prefer to support Japanese rather than indigenous manufacturers. This is well demonstrated by the fact that goods sell better when they are given Japanese sounding names even though designed/made by a British company in the UK e.g. GEC/Hitachi TVs in the 1980s, certain precision instruments etc.

Perhaps MGR should have renamed itself to sound Japanese?

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Old 22nd August 2019, 11:28   #39
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Hi Maninder. Whilst I agree in part with you, do you not think it would have cost us, the paying public, you and I, less, if the banks and their gambling houses, because that is what they are, had been ‘allowed’ to fail big time? How many of the millionaires who have piloted(crashed) in flames! working as the ‘big noise’ at the top of banking, have been made poorer by their incompetence? I cann’t think of one can you? I can remember reading an article some years ago, it was a biography, and the person made a comment, which went along the lines of ‘ if you are looking for thieves rogues and vagabonds, look no further than this house(by which I think he means parliament) and the banks. This was in the 19th century. Say no more. And they still try to fiddle their expenses. Well I never.
You are quite correct - the system was set up so that a bank could fail - the investors compensation scheme was there and could easily have sorted it.

The Americans did just that with Lehman Brothers and the mortgage providers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The result was less than two years of some disruption for the US.

In contrast - saving Gordon Browns “Super Regulator” by propping up the Banks with more and more taxpayers money put us into an economic decline that lasted a decade.
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Old 22nd August 2019, 11:42   #40
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Originally Posted by Darcydog View Post
May I suggest you do write that book. What you outline above resonates with my experience. Tho’ to be fair, whilst I clearly recognise many aspects of what you have set out, my experience of the Private Sector and the Public Sector was that the Public Sector was very much worse.

This was because despite monumental “Male Chicken ups” the Public Sector never had to worry about Profit. In fact - many of those in the Public Sector I worked with saw the very idea of “Profit” as akin to something you trod in.

There idea of “work” was meetings - lots of them, and with lots of people. It was normal to attend a meeting and the head guy would come in flanked by his assistant and a couple of his or her under managers - all of which had assistants to take notes - and then their would be me.

This series of meetings would go on for months and as often as not they would conclude that whatever it was was not a good idea and the notion would be scrapped.

Invariably the summary would be along the self justification lines of:-

“All these meetings have been a valuable use of time effort and resources because we now know what we are not going to do.”

I hope you do write a book - I’m writing mine.

Much as it may pain me to say so but I entirely agree with this.
Very true I'm afraid
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