Build it in Britain.

[Workingman]

Deride services as much as you want, those businesses are ALL over the UK and we are leading the world in it.

There you go again, putting words in my mouth. I said exactly the opposite. I said that they are a vital part of our economy. The thing is that they take a certain type of person, with certain types of skills and a high level of intelligence. We might send 50% of the population to university, but we are still not turning out those people. On a normal distribution curve most of us fall below the 80th percentile. Some of us might be smart, but we ain't that smart.

On the other side we cannot keep growing these sectors ad infinitum. If we have not already reached peak "services" we cannot be far off. We therefore have no choice but to look at something else. If it's widgets then it's widgets.

But the point is that those millions will have built a life based on Corbyn's widgets, bought houses funded on mortgages backed by the wages from producing Corbyn's widgets.

At least they will have had the chance to buy houses and other possessions, unlike today. Today they have built a life on min wage and in-work benefits. They might be working, but they are also taking out of the pot when they could be put to work adding to the pot.

Come the time it all falls apart, a whole segment of our population will be financially and emotionally destroyed.

Yes. A bit like Thatcher's closing down industry in favour of "London". The wheel turns, otherwise it gets a flat spot, the economy needs to do the same. At present we are in "flat spot" territory.

Services - Finance, Tourism, Manufacturing, digital, science etc - all bring money in, but they can not grow forever and we cannot all work in them. What we need to do is open doors to more inflow / income. Who gives a shot whether it is widgets or thingamajigs?

[Suff]

There you go again, putting words in my mouth. I said exactly the opposite. I said that they are a vital part of our economy. The thing is that they take a certain type of person, with certain types of skills and a high level of intelligence. .

Perhaps. But you don't see services quite the same way I do. Take, for instance, the games industry as I have been looking into that in detail for my Grandson. One of the things the Games industry has spawned is a whole sub industry of testing. Games testers don't need degreed and the upper percentile they do need to be in is:

1. Be good enough gamers to get all the way through the game
2. Be observant enough to actually "see" what is going on and what is not working properly
3. Be extremely diligent in reporting what you do see.

1 and 2 are not something you can learn in college. You are either good enough or you are not. 3 is something anyone can learn no matter where they are on the ladder of education. That is something the Army dinned into me without mercy. Any idiot can follow a checklist.

Yes. A bit like Thatcher's closing down industry in favour of "London". The wheel turns, otherwise it gets a flat spot, the economy needs to do the same. At present we are in "flat spot" territory.

I'm from Lincoln. Unlike all those other people who seem to have found the mid to late 70's a vibrant time with easy work, Lincoln, by 1978 was a wasteland of dying companies and a rotting corpse of a city. What did Thatcherism do for Lincoln? It re-envisioned the city and the county into the most modern companies with lean and agile credentials. Not all tech, there is light industry and the kind of stuff you don't get from China because we specialise in it. It is also very heavily into AI and CAD/CAM technologies.

Corbyn and his like wouldn't know it if he fell over it and broke his legs.

He's far more in tune with the Unions who are trying to destroy the rail services in southern England so they can keep guards on the trains... He wants to nationalise industries, drive the investors away and, somehow, make it all work.

Making and selling widgets is a business activity. All Corbyn does is spend his time running businesses down. So who is going to step up and produce these widgets? Virgin Manufacturing? Forget it he's a Blairite.

There is plenty we could be manufacturing, but we don't. We don't manufacture this stuff because people like Corbyn made it impossible for us to manufacture them.

The irony is too thick to cut with a chainsaw.

[Workingman]

The games industry.... good one.

In Lincolnshire, or even the UK, it employs how many of the 65 miillons of us? Brings in how much - Lincoln/UK wise?

Lincoln(shire) big in AI and CAD/CAM eh. Give me a break. Lincolnshire is largely agricultural. Lincoln is a large town, it is only a city because it has an historical cathedral/minster. It is in no way representative of the UK's industrial or economic sectors. If it has AI and CAD/CAM workers they are in their dozens, if that.

There is plenty we could be manufacturing, but we don't. We don't manufacture this stuff because people like Corbyn made it impossible for us to manufacture them.

Ballcocks! It was the love of your life, Thatcher, who closed down UK manufacturing.

I admired her for what she did to the unions, but I will never forgive her for what she did to the industries of the north. Hell is way to nice for her to rest her soul, there has to be some place much worse.

[Suff]

Well it's all opinion isn't it.

When I was a teenager, Clayton Dewandre had six factories in Lincolnshire making pumping and hydraulics equipment, Ruston Bucyrus had three factories making gas turbines and Robey had three factories making heavy industry equipment, they had been a steam engine manufacturer.

On top of this, Fosters, the manufacturer of agricultural equipment, were the main contractor in the manufacture of the first tanks for WWI. The company was acquired by Amalgamated Power Engineering in the 1960's and I read from the wiki page, "After a difficult period in the 1970s, when due to ongoing losses APE sold a number of subsidiaries". The Lincoln subsidiaries went.

Not bad for an "agricultural" city in the middle of farming land. Of course Scunthorpe, just up the road, was a major producer of steel in those days so not so surprising after all.

By the end of the 1980's there were no Clayton Dewandre factories in Lincoln, Robey was gone as a company and Ruston Bucyrus was down to one factory which became Napier who used it to produce turbochargers.

You can say, all you want, that it was Thatcher who killed those businesses. But you will be wrong. I was there, I lived there and I know the economic situation at the end of the 1970's. They were already dead before Thatcher came in. All she did was given them a decent burial and sow the seed of the recovery.

Industry in Lincoln was killed by rampant taxes, inability to export and massive interruptions in the supply of vital goods like steel plus the interruptions in power every time the coal unions wanted more money.

It wasn't Maggie who trashed what was left of the UK industrial heartland. It was Labour, their inability to control the unions and their dislike of the companies who actually made the money all their Union friends were so free in spending.

Now you want me to believe that a left wing idiot like Corbyn can be trusted to..... Of all things..... Bring back manufacturing to the UK????

That's the best laugh I've had all month.

Don't sniff at the Games industry. It is a template for the kind of things we need to "manufacture". High volume, low labour, high value, intense delivery industry. No place for a union, it is the kind if place you grow up in. It burns the young and rewards those who make it as they are older.

If anyone had said that the computer games industry in the UK would be putting half a billion into the treasury every year (and likely more as many of these companies do not use the correct company code for what they do), back in 2009, they would have been laughed out of the place. Even I would have been sceptical, although more amenable than most knowing the size of the market.

You laugh about computer games. It is a €150 billion global business. A little less than Germany exports in to the UK in total.

I did a little check. The total tax receipts from Banking and the total was around £30bn. However the banking business is in the £Trillions of turnover. It is 60 times the input to government in taxes and Hundreds, if not close to thousands, of times higher in turnover.

Another little fact crawled out of the woodwork when I saw that too. Corporation tax dropped from 30% to 20% and the tax levy in the banking sector increased. In fact tax receipts have continued to increase since the drop in CT.

Corbyn is a high corporation tax aficionado. Stuff it to the companies to pay for his pretty little nationalisation scheme. The only thing he will find, as his forebears in the 1970's found, is that his money will decrease, crippling his programmes and dumping them out of government.

Widgets? You won't even see the factory floors open before the whole lot is shut down and sold off for warehousing of other things which actually produce an economic benefit.

I am not against manufacturing in the UK. Absoluteley not. I've been unemployed in an area that made me unemployable, hell, yes, I want jobs for people.

But Corbyn to deliver that? Get real, the man is an idealist idiotic intolerant apologist for the "right kind" of intolerants.

I wouldn't give him a job making Fairy Cakes.

[Workingman]

Lincolnshire is largely agricultural.

So that is Lincolnshire, the county, and most of it is agrarian. I never said it was devoid of manufacturing. You made that up.

Thatcherism. Maggie's political philosophy of "free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, 'Victorian values' (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism" according to her chancellor, Nigel Lawson; had a name. You know, just like the famous Atleeism, Wilsonism, Douglas-Homeism, Macillanism... oh, wait.

[Suff]

Lincolnshire is largely agricultural.

So that is Lincolnshire, the county, and most of it is agrarian. I never said it was devoid of manufacturing. You made that up.

Thatcherism. Maggie's political philosophy of "free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, 'Victorian values' (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism" according to her chancellor, Nigel Lawson; had a name. You know, just like the famous Atleeism, Wilsonism, Douglas-Homeism, Macillanism... oh, wait.

If I took it the wrong way I apologise. But Lincoln and as a result Lincolnshire, was quite powerful industrially for the make-up. But you actually had to live it, it was never widely publicised outside of the county.

I know exactly what Thatcherism was and it is not what was advertised. Thatcherism was about controlling the unions and letting business get on with building an economy which could support shocks and fund a social system which was likely to grow.

She succeeded so well that even Blair and Brown were scared to fiddle with it too much. Even the fiddling they did do was virtually disastrous.

Corbyn, on the other hand, has no fear of meddling. Once he has pulled the roof down on us all, he'll just claim it was the fault of someone else.

There is a sad fact of life that in order to have social values and a social conscience, you have to have the money and the economy to support it. People like Corbyn want to destroy the economy and the money to feed their "social" values. Leaving us prey to another dose of "Thatcherism" to sort the mess out.

Why go there? Oh, I forgot. Those horrible Tories don't have a "social" enough conscience.

Funnily enough the most social Tory I've seen in my life was Cameron and everyone wanted to hate him.

Such is life!