The new look, redesigned Service Dealer magazine goes bi-monthly in 2014 with a host of new and familiar features.
First issue will contain:
2014 STATE OF THE INDUSTRY REPORT HERITAGE AWARDS PROFILE OF DAVID WITHERS LIVES REMEMBERED BTME PREVIEW LAMMA PREVIEW DIARY OF A SEASON + 2014 EVENT PLANNER
MANUFACTURING 'NEWS' We under-value our strengths at our peril
IT is often said we get the politicians we deserve. We also get the press we deserve.
In the week that the Prime Minister took a plane-load of businessmen to China, the Daily Mail weighed in with sneering comments, suggesting ‘cronie-ism’, and questioned why a former ‘pornographer’ (Karen Brady) and footballer were on the trip? (you can bet the Premier League are eyeing up China big time). The PM’s words of support for British industry were described as ‘gushing’. It was populist journalism at its worst.
Now I bow to nobody in my admiration for the Daily Mail, its commercial success and ability to sniff out readable stories, but as Matthew Parris said in The Times last Saturday “I wouldn’t vote for it!”.
Hearing Clare Balding on Desert Island Discs this week, was to be reminded of the incredible sense of national pride, togetherness, and a feel-good ‘British’ united front that swept the country just over 12 months ago during the London Olympics.
Where has it all gone? Regretfully, we have reverted to type, and our papers trot out platitudes and perceptions that are way off-beam. Like, ‘We don’t make things in this country anymore’.
Oh no? Whilst some products have disappeared into the global production line, the UK car industry is riding the crest of an all-time high. Over 1.5 million cars were made in the UK during the past twelve months, a hefty percentage of which were exported. And those vehicles require a huge and complex network of small engineering firms supplying components. Companies who are not regarded universally as manufacturers, but who are every bit as important as the headline manufacture itself.
And now this morning (6 December), the announcement by JCB that it is to create 2500 jobs in the West Midlands over the next five years, leading to an estimated 7500 further jobs in support suppliers and services. Commentators are shying away from using the phrase 'green shoots', but whichever way you wrap it up, the UK economy is starting to move in the right direction, hopefully have learned the lessons of the past. Practical jobs, real jobs, making things, reparing things, learning a trade are gradually returning to the employment agenda.
If I had a gripe about the PM’s Chinese trip it was the absence of anyone with a connection to land-based engineering. But then, one high profile delegation aboard DC-One does not mean exclusion for others. More and more of our products have an established Chinese connection, and even relatively small companies such as our leading garden machinery distributors employ people on the ground in China to ‘bridge’ their manufacturing capability to our market requirements.
As a country, we will never again be a major manufacturing hub. But that does not mean that we should not sell our strengths at every opportunity in what is now a truly global market.
