What's Stopping Us from Producing Our Own Goods?

There are plenty of things that are still made in the UK, I think it is juts because there are lots of things made in other countries that we forget that we make a lot of stuff.

I agree that there are so many chinese made products in the uk but there are still manufacturers out there, if you don't know of any take a look at this link makeitbritish.co.uk/. I think one of the reasons that we don't make as much as we used to is so that the 'powers that be' can claim that they, as you say, we are greener because we don't have as much pollution from factories going into the air. In reality we are just changing where the pollution comes from as the products will be produced somewhere!

There's still a lot of stuff made in the UK. Most are made in China because of cheap labour

Considering we were at the forefront of the industrial revolution etc i find it a crying shame that we make so little of our own goods at home. I suppose it's all to do with trade and commerce, goodwill, reciprocal arrangements etc. But I try to buy British whenever I can.

Everyone depends on China for most things now J

Thats why no action was taken against them after covid, nobody wanted to rock the boat, even that is made in China

Cheap labour and better factories.

Well a number of factors, it’s no coincidence that most of the goods in the world come from places where they can pay their workers a pittance. We can’t compete with that as we have the minimum wage. Also the laws are less strict in a lot of places so corners can be cut at the expense of more accidents etc.

But then you have to think that places like germany are able to produce whilst also paying a minimum wage so it must be possible. It’s an interesting one for sure, I’d like to buy more british things but they are so damn expensive

Chinese wages can be decent. The Chinese government actively works to make their currency have as low a value as possible to aid exports and make imports more expensive. UK sterling is grossly overvalued, it should have devalued as we lost a huge percentage of our factories but the government has prioritised a high value for sterling which perhaps might benefit the financial sector.

As it is our exports are mostly uncompetitive and sometimes taking a holiday abroad is much cheaper than having a holiday at home which shows how ridiculous sterling is.

The government just keeps borrowing to prop up the economy but ultimately a huge crunch will happen as our debts become completely unmanageable. Unfortunately politicians in the country are completely incompetent and not focused on the real issue which should be the economy. Conservative and Labour are absolutely terrible and the smaller parties are even worse in my opinion. 99% of politics should be running the economy well. Unfortunately consumers are economically illiterate mostly so they don't really understand what is going on and often focus on ridiculous solutions that can be more damaging to the economy.

The country is heading for bankruptcy and will probably need an IMF bailout and there will be a huge financial crunch and we will be faced with severe poverty.

There are absolutely no reasons we can't manufacture more, grow more and run a sound economy. However we do have probably 50 years of debt to pay, sorting the country out will be a long slog at least half a century I would say. We are an independent nation again so we have the ability to make the right policies for us but no one has done that so far.