We can't afford it

Interesting how American news stories hit the front pages (and media equivalent) in Europe.

Like the American Olympic team outfits that were made in China.

Interesting as I have no idea what the German team uniform looks like, or where it is made. If Adidas have anything to do with it, though, I will lay all the odds you like that it will not be made in Germany. Back in the 1990s when I was still interested in buying sports shoes, they were made mainly in South Korea. I anticipate that in this "corporations need to make large profits and the rest of us can live on huge amounts of debt and fresh air" economy that we now have, that even South Korea will be too expensive (Hell, they have, shock, horror!, Unions in South Korea - quick, move out!) and they will have been to that worker's paradise (satire!), the people's chronic dictatorship of China.

From Highgate cemetery the rumblings of Karl Marx's remains can be heard. This is Communism? If textbook Communism is supposed to remove poverty and raise the living standards of the workers who own the means of production ....

The Australian Olympic Committee were pretty blunt on the uniforms that there team will wear.

"We can't afford to make them in Australia!" apparently!

I used to live in Lancashire. In its heyday Lancashire was a textile manufacturing centre, par excellence. Large numbers of people used to get paid insultingly low wages, live in insanitary slums, and struggled to survive. Even then the industry was prone to fluctuations - see the mill closures in the 1930s.

Come the postwar period and people's lifestyles started to improve (and remember that it was the MacMillan government that did more to remove the slums than anyone - in those days the UK Conservative Party was interested in the good of the country as a whole, not in merely looking after their wealthy friends in the City of London) and their expectations also increased, the textile industry managed to survive quite well. More people had money to spend, so they bought more clothes, so the companies made money selling more products.

An interesting philosophy. Then came the 80s, the era of quick and easy money for the City gamblers and high unemployment for the rest of us. The vast majority of the textile mills were moved to cheap labour outlets elsewhere in the world and that is where they have stayed. This happened not just to people in Lancashire, the rest of industrial Europe (and probably the US) went the same way.

I read some nonsense yesterday from a person at the ultraconservative Cato Institute in the US yesterday along the lines that this is no big deal.

All the designers, planners, distributors, sales personnel usw were still based in the West, all the Asians (principally Chinese) do is "sew"!

So we are all supposed to become designers at Ralph Lauren for a living?

The 40% of kids who leave school in the UK without anything but minimum qualifications can get jobs as easily as that in high fashion? Who is trying to kid whom?

And don't tell me that distribution (driving vans taking the products to stores usw) will fill all the requirements.

There are nowhere near enough jobs for qualified people, let alone the unqualified. Despite record low birth rates (meaning the lowest numbers of people in the 18-25 age range in some 200 years), youth unemployment is disgustingly high across Europe and getting worse by the month.

These people are the future, and if they do not get careers started in this period of their life, will they ever?

There is also the fact that every one of the countries that became among the richest nations in the world did so as they had an industrial base. China, India, Brazil and Russia, four of the world's fastest growing countries are not getting there by putting industry to one side and just getting people to drive vans for a living. They are manufacturing things!

Germany has serious problems, but the UK is in much worse shape still. Germany has abandoned too much of its industrial base (see the Rhine Ruhr), but has at least kept substantial parts of it. The UK under Thatcher decided to become a banker's paradise and who needs industry anyway. 30 years later - government debt at record levels, personal debt at record levels, unemployment at a 14 year high, 22% of the population living below the poverty line, and all you want are van drivers for cheap imported Chinese goods and McDonalds lackeys who earn no more than you would earn in a textile plant????

It is time for industry to return to the West as a whole. It is time to drop the nonsense (and speculation) that we have been living with for the past 30 years. It is time for a return to investment and long-term planning, and local production!

We can't afford it? We cannot NOT afford it!