It's good news. Get over it.

Yes, that graph does take account of inflation. You can see it doesn't flinch from showing the catastrophic effects of the 80s recession. Also, if it weren't inflation-adjusted, it would show massive (10-20% per year) increases throughout the 70s.

The article is completely right. Manufacturing output grew by about 20% overall during Thatcher's tenure, and it's grown significantly since then. That doesn't mean there wasn't a huge recession - just that the recovery, as commonly happens, carried on to a higher point than the start.

Now Britain is becoming a more service-based economy. That's a good thing: it means a much higher proportion of people get to live in ways that were previously only available to the wealthy middle classes. There are people to cook food and make our drinks for us (in restaurants and cafes - your working-class ancestors, pre-WWII, probably never set foot in such a place from one year's end to the next, unless as a waiter); people to entertain us on demand (just by switching on a TV); machines and people (dry cleaners) to do our laundry; people to repair our plumbing or our windows, or any of the thousand-and-one chores that ate up our great-grandparents' lives. How is this not good?

And all it requires is that manufacturing, and agriculture, produce more output for much less human work. Thus freeing people up not only to write code, but also to open coffee shops, cake shops, cheese shops, to make TV commercials and write blogs and publish a mind-buggering range of magazines and guides to all this "worthless" activity. There are still genuinely poor people in Britain, but the median household lifestyle now is vastly, hugely, humungously better than it was half a century ago.

Indeed

Of course industrial output has hardly declined. Such is the shortage of working men and women that we even have a part time sheet metal worker as a junior member of the cabinet, who does some defence in his spare time. ;->

Inflation and bits

Yes, the figures are inflation adjusted. I should have made that clear but was simply assuming that "index" would have given the clue. It's all in, as above, 2005 pounds.

North Sea oil is not included: nor is mining. This is purely manufacturing, extractive industries are not included (there's another part of the same stats set that can be used for that).

Yes, I know manufacturing employment has fallen. I mention that.

UKIP: yes, I'm a member and supporter: I *used* to be the press officer. Worked doing that only for the year up to the euro elections.

As to political reasons: no, nothing to do with coming elections. More annoyance with the way that the political conversation seems to have got stuck in a rut of stating that manufacturing has been disembowelled. When it hasn't, as the numbers show. Manufacturing employment has, yes, but that is, as said, something very different.

To put it another way around. The NHS employs 1.3 million people and is about 10% of the entire economy. Both the number and the percentage have grown substantially since 1947, the year of its inception. Those people have to come from somewhere, that percentage of the economy has to come from somewhere. To be absurd about it, think that in 1947 the economy was 80% manufacturing and 20% agriculture (it wasn't, this is just to explain the logic).

Now it's 10% NHS (which is a service) and thus we must have both manufacturing and agriculture stuffed into the 90% of the economy that is left. So one or the other (or both) must have declined as a percentage of the economy to make room for the existence of the NHS.

Yes, I know, we didn't have 0% of the economy as health care in 1946, but it was a lot less than 10%.

Now, repeat the same exercise with the expansion of tertiary education. Of secondary education (even the moving of the school leaving age from 14 to 16 will have an effect).

Now, you can claim, if you want to, that the NHS, the expansion of education, aren't worth it, but they are services and that's some part of what has reduced manufacturing as a percentage of the economy.

UGH OH

The big trap the author has fallen into here is the difficult issue of how we measure manufacturing output, most significantly what proportion of "value" we attribute to the actual manufacturing process and what proportion to the research and development aspect involved in the goods.

For instance in pharmaceuticals, a firm like GSK can manufacture a new cancer drug in the UK that can cost only a few pounds to make per pill but can charge hundreds per pill globally on the open market.

On the surface this would seem like an enormously value added manufacturing activity but in reality is it right to attribute all that value added simply to manufacturing when 95%+ of the cost is in R&D?

After all when the patent expires on the drug and the intelectual property is lost that manufacturing activity would suddenly become low value added overnight as generic copies are made of the drug overseas by other firms.

An awful lot of UK manufacturing is like this and charts like the Index of Production are simply unable to separate the contribution to value of actual manufacturing and R&D in manufacturing output.

My suspicion is that real manufacturing output in the UK has fallen significantly since at least 1970. You can't simply compare the value of declining pig iron production with the rise of manufacturing expensive new drugs.

Err...

"Which school did you say you attended ?"

Since you ask, Downside.

"You show an increase between 1950 and 2006 of roughly 60%, so, if I take just the cost of petrol at the pumps."

The figures are already inflation adjusted.

There are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

As per the title, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Take your pick as to which you consider this article to be.

Personally I go on a more simple basis. For 30 years I worked for a major supplier of test equipment to the electronics industry and specialised in Board Test Systems. We used to have a large number of customers in the UK. However from the mid to late 90s onwards, we saw the slow death of volume electronics manufacture in the UK. First it went to Eastern Europe, then to the Far East and most of it ended up in China. Its unlikely to ever return to the UK because the people who knew how to do it (and believe me it is NOT the simple job that some people would have you believe) have moved on to other jobs or long term unemployment.

As for the rest of UK manufacturing industry, well in the distant past, we used to have a steel industry, a coal industry, a ship building industry, a car industry etc etc. We used to have farmers who grew food instead of field upon field of oil seed rape. I'm not saying that any of the above were perfect or (in some cases) weren't artificially propped up but we did have them.

There may be a statistical basis for the article and graph but I suspect it is based on skewed data and selective interpretation which is the favourite way of "proving" that all of us who feel something is blindingly obvious are in fact wrong.

golden days...

"I worked here and...." "I have a mate who..." yeah right - your insights are so much more knowledgeable than the blokes who put the original figures together. Post 701196 - we may not make the bullets but BAe (British and the 2nd largest defense contractor in the world) make all the clever things to fire them.

As a percentage of GDP (in 2007), UK manufacturing was 23.4%. France (the country that 'supports' it's manufacturers) was only 20.6%. Our GDP itself was also higher. I know you will all whine that 2007 (the most recent reliable figures I could find) are before our anglo-saxon created crash. But three years ago you still wouldn't have believed it (but don't they have Citroen!?) The percentage of our economy that is manufacturing may have been shrinking over the past 40 years (mainly due to the rise of the financial sector), but as the graph shows, the value of what we do manufacture has still increased well ahead of inflation.

My Dad worked in a factory all his working life. It was shit. Given the choice he wishes he had worked on a computer colouring in like I do, or serving lattes in Starbucks to people who make money in the city. Who the f*ck do you people think you are, sat infront of your comfy computer getting misty eyed about factory life like some 21st century William Morris.

Of course we don't dig coal anymore. We don't need to. It's a shit job. With little profit. Let the Chinese kill themselves down a mine getting it out.

Yes, educate children to a higher standard, encourage opportunities for communities that have not adapted to the closure of local industry. These criticisms of policy are valid but please, don't try to make me think we want those polluting, life shortening, dull, exhausting industries back.

Only the f*cking middle classes believe the bullshit about a hard days work being any kind of pleasure for a working man. Banging in hot rivets or coding software for banks… which do you prefer? Pricks the lot of you. Give it all up and get on a plane to China and work in a ship builders there mate if you love manufacturing so much.

The recent reports of the UK company that have harnessed quantum physics for a touch screen display show the future of UK industry, much like ARM. Design the tech, license it to far east manufacturers and make more profit per device than they do. Keep innovating and stay one step ahead of the competition. Not look back to some golden heyday when men died at 55 and never saw their kids grow up like my grandad.