Specialised home manufacture a possibility FORUM

production of high valueadding, specialised, short-run outputs which we could create and supply because we could afford to invest in a highlyskilled workforce.

Robert Findley (CNN 382) regrets no longer being able to purchase locally-made footwear.

Research of that industry by me and others in the late nineties, suggests that perhaps those shoes were not as locally-made as he thinks.

Some imported cut soles and uppers in dense stacks then shaped, sewed and glued etc. to produce the much more space-demanding product.

More to the point, it illustrated that then we could contribute our more complex skills to economic effect.

Now? Perhaps not in mass shoe manufacture, but, for instance, in bespoke footwear?

Hyland casts doubt on submarine-manufacture as a contributor.

However, we might recall that subsidised car-manufacturing was justified because those trained there carried their skills to other industry sectors. There is no reason to think that would not happen with those employed in highly complex marine-vessel manufacture.

We are not a nation where we stay in one job for life; rather, we typically move vertically and laterally, carrying and building on our skills and knowledge to the betterment of our work.

But by deserting the development of a complex, highly-skilled manufacturing industry, we have failed to take full advantage of that practice.

With increasing problems in waste disposal and in demand for source materials, we must move from being a throw-away economy.

Manufacturing can play a contributing role in the supply of people with skills applicable in maintenance and repair.

This is not to suggest that we withdraw from the global economy.

We will always want to purchase in the massproduction market. And that means selling to achieve a balance of trade.