The Poolie Bunker

Some thing to kill the time before the new season starts, a series of documentaries on YouTube called Lost Industries going back to their origins from Breweries, Shoe Manufacturing, Clocks, Norton Bikes, Truck Industry etc too many to add, brings a tear to your eye to see how many manufacturing companies the U.K. but all lost for one reason or another, mismanagement, greed, financial issues others by cheap imports etc The only downside is the narration is AI generated so not all the pronunciations are correct more so the one about Vaux Brewers where it’s pronounced Vax or something similar.

Very interesting Jamie indeed.

Also you may want to take a look at this site:

https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/categories-of-risk/

We don't even make hand stitched cricket balls any more!!!

Really? How’s that?

Got me stumped.

This news has knocked me for six

It's as good as over..

They bailed out.

Great list there Stocksfield, people don’t handcraft stuff anymore even food proffering to order online delivery.
Lost Industries videos on YouTube everyone was a household which created 1000s of jobs and apprenticeships.

Answers simple.
ALL Governments over the past 40 years have thought the future was in everyone having a degree and spending their lives tapping away at a keyboard.
Getting mildly dirty for a living was abhorrent to our middle class rulers of ALL Party’s, they looked down on it.
Also business would rather import crap from the third world and shaft lots of small suppliers, but basically working in industry was frowned by all Partys while patronising workers for their vote.
None of the established Party’s will ever change this because they all secretly share the same opinion but would never admit it.

Thirty years ago most lorry’s and buses on the road were British made, now you’d be pushed to find one, yet most countries in Europe still produce them

Our problem is simple, engineering in countries like Germany is looked on with pride, here we frown on it and give respect to those occupations such as the the Law and any job that avoids breaking remotely into a sweat.

when you think of it with all these local industries in the history books why isn,t there even more unemployment. not many towns have a lower population than they had in the 70,s when most places were still open. saw one about oldham last night where they produced 10% of all the worlds cotton production and over 12,000 worked at Platts cotton machine manufacturers.

That’s not the problem, it’s the UK labour laws, minimum wage and Human Rights. For mass produced manufactured goods, the cost of manufacturing them in the UK is way higher than in places like China, India, Taiwan etc. They can run sweatshops paying people pennies and produce the same things at a fraction of the price. The UK can’t compete with that unless we got rid of everything that protects workers from being abused and which ensures they receive enough money to live in this country. Companies in the UK can’t compete on price, as they will be undercut by the imports.

Look at the speed of the Chinese car market growth, the world is now being flooded by brand new makes like Jaecoo that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, the companies have highly educated scientists, engineers and designers who create the tech and design the cars, then an army of blue collar workers, backed up by robot automation, to build them for pennies and undercut every other manufacturer.

There are two ways of dealing with it, either put huge tariffs on the import of any of the goods, like Trump is trying to do, but which means that all prices increase and your own cost of living increases further. Or allow the imports and focus retraining the workforce to industries where we can compete.

countries all need machinery to manufacture items. right at the outset i wonder if these countries got machinery from the west to kill off the hand that originally fed it.

A friends teenager has been at college for a year training to be a plater, they have now secured an apprenticeship at a Middlesbrough Engineering works, They received their first wage this week, just under £300 for 38 hours. The same company was at the college and they are struggling to recruit welders and platers, there are job opportunities out there, is it a case kids don’t want to do that type of work, it’s not as if the money is pittance for an 18 year old ?

Quote, Look at the speed of the Chinese car market growth, the world is now being flooded by brand new makes like Jaecoo that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, the companies have highly educated scientists, engineers and designers who create the tech and design the cars, then an army of blue collar workers, backed up by robot automation, to build them for pennies and undercut every other manufacturer.
This has been mentioned many times on here after the devastation of the manufacturing industry the U.K. failed to invest in new innovations instead sent kids to university to get worthless degrees, no job opportunities and saddled with debt with student loans.

Edit, when the North Sea kicked off a Dutch company built heavy lift cranes to install modules in North Sea Installations, in 2024 the same company used a vessel to lift and move a 31000 tonnes rig back to Graythorpe. It was no mean feat I worked on the installation so was aware of the task. Where were all the U.K. companies when they knew at some point the North Sea installations would have to be removed and design a similar vessel albeit it was built in Korea.

If you remember the Thatcher years, there were photos and stories in the local and national news about chunks of British industry being dismantled and shipped off to places like Taiwan to be re-assembled. It wasn't just the mining industry, it was iron and steel, petro-chemicals, dockyards, the lot. Her whole idea was to replace an industry-based economy with a services based economy.

It seemed to work for a while and Blair was all for it too. Then came the 2008 banking crash, 'invisible exports' tanked and the Bank of England had to print money to pay for all the things we used to make.

Thatcherism was a disaster for young lads in areas like the North-East. Their dads and granddads had well-paid jobs in the steelworks, ICI, the pits and the docks. They were lucky if they could find work stacking shelves in a supermarket. No wonder a lot went off the rails. That's a problem that's generations old now.

The problem was unions had become all too powerful, Thatcher could have curbed that but chose to obligate any industry which opposed her.

Blair was equally culpable for the death of many industries.
One of the biggest issues was the UK complied with EU regulations to the letter whereas the likes of Germany and France chose which they'd comply with - hence German shipyards are still open as an example.
Feck me we can't even build enough houses because there's not enough homegrown brickies, joiners, sparkys, plumbers, roofers, etc

The Chinese are a role model for no one, they’re the new Victorians storming ahead, but always at a cost home and away….would you wish to live in such a community…?
Other countries in Europe can manage it, it’s within our means , but all politicians talk the talk but are clueless and indifferent to something they can never relate to..Mu first twenty years in engineering were scarey at times, you took some knocks…but you had a sense of earned achievement…something that’s missing for a lot of people now, replaced by frustration and loss of self worth.

The industries were long gone when Blair came into power Thatcher ensured that, closed then demolished, the top and bottom kids don’t want to work on a freezing cold building site anymore. I must be on some agencies data base and get send multiple jobs at rates way above any than i ever had before I retired.

You're having a laugh, Blair started the mad rush to University education and student debt.
Look at the industries around Hartlepool that went through the Blair Brown years. Thatcher destroyed the mining industry without doubt but Labour did feck all for industry and manufacturing.

You just can’t cope with facing facts…they were all at it….,Blair was the naive smararse getting everyone signed up for Uni…and massive debt.
It became fashionable to look down down your nose at any one actually getting dirty for a living.

No idea what you are on about Snowy, what facts ?

Didn’t I just say that in a previous post, Labour couldn’t do much for industry as more or less as soon as a place closed it was demolished like Consett Steelworks and Sunderland Shipbuikders. As soon as the pumps stopped in a pit it flooded making it beyond repair.

No you didn't, you said they were all long gone when Blair came to power.

Here we go again.

Dear me I said you said, yes you did no I didn’t, rinse and repeat PTID.

But that is what you said or are you now denying it, feck me it was only a couple of posts back on this very thread!!
I said, you said, isn't that the basis of debate?

No I said yes I did, didn’t you realise I was taking the pi** PTID ?
You must sit there for hours going through my posts, got Jamie on this one, I will pull him up on that.

The latest one is about Ever Ready batteries, at its peak in 1963, British Ever Ready (BEREC) operated 28 factories across the UK. Major manufacturing sites included:Tanfield Lea, County Durham: The largest plant built (1968), employing over 1,000 people and producing up to three million batteries daily. It was the last UK factory to close, shutting down in 1996.
Ever Ready (and its parent company, Union Carbide) invented the modern cylindrical alkaline battery in 1957 but hesitated to produce it. Management chose to keep prioritizing older zinc-carbon batteries because they had invested heavily in those production lines, wrongly assuming the new alkaline technology was too expensive and wouldn't catch on, the rest is history, Duracell comes to mind.

similar in the cotton inductry when i new process in making the material came about but most stayed with the old and system. however i feel it would only have slowed up the process of killing an industry off as there seemed to be no will to keep them open. then there was the car industry killed off not just by management and workers but the general public themselves. even car stickers were made showing a tramp and saying look at me i bought british. ok there was some shit around at the time, but there also was from european manufacturers and erly jananese stuff as anybody who bought a toyota crown from 1980 would have told you. they rusted quicker than anything that ever came out of luton or dagenham.

that was blairs answer to teenage unemployment. loan em money to go to university to lower the numbers of them. if you are promoised something and paying for it you are not going to get your hands dirty after three years of doss and shangri lah.

This is interesting about the Mini, one of the senior management team stripped one down added up the parts etc and he estimated BMC were losing £30/35 on every car but they kept churning them out.
https://youtu.be/LoYf7lxDBJM?si=svo8XP2GbfcMa_mU

Just extending their childhood form a fair percentage….if you want to make money learn a trade…as most graduates can’t even change a light bulb.
Universities should only be dealing in those subjects we need ….instead of so called Uni’s jumping up all over the country offering worthless degrees in subjects not worthy of the title ‘Degree’.

It’s amazing how many people on Facebook etc asking for handyman etc to trivial jobs round their property due to a lack of DIY knowledge, degreed up but can’t put a screw in the wall to hang a picture up.

Try getting a plumber for a non urgent job and you'll probably wait months.
Blairs push for every kid to get a degree, many in ridiculous subjects, has caused lasting damage. Let's not forget after hooking them he also then introduced them to tuition fees and decades of debt.
If any government was interested in delivering on house building or infrastructure projects they'd be championing Technical Colleges and putting real emphasis and importance of manual trades.

nothing new or revolutionary there. a jack of all trade types existed to do these type of little jobs. lots of tradesmen were top in there field but nobody elses a welder would do someone elses welding whilst he himself would get the decorator around .

then there will be those who never will pay off that debt as they,ll either never get a job or just work in low paid jobs. more money down the drain so they might have well given them unemployment benefit. more likely they would have taken anything or even trained for something if they were not promised the earth.

Just googled strange degrees and you can get a degree in brewing and distilling, or bakery, when surely an apprenticeship in those industries would be far more appropriate for most?
Wonder how many of the current lot of MPs were drop outs from this one though - degree in Circus Performance?

They’re glorified City and Guilds without the rigour and sold off as degrees.
The average City and Guilds course was four years in length was a full day at college every week and night classes…… and the new wave of ‘educators’ have been pruning them back relentlessly.

It’s the ‘false’ apprenticeships they are creating nowadays, even the office junior can be classed as an apprentice.

It’s an abuse of the word by people who’ve never broke sweat in their pompous lives.

A vlog about how the Chinese are taking over redundant car plants or amalgamate with car plants like Nissan in Sunderland to manufacture EV Cars.The commentary is AI generated so the pronunciations are a bit strange.
https://youtu.be/wARc3BZHw_k?si=gPaV4UEa_ZfWfJVe