chazza

British HE varies from world class to bottom of the class. We need more of the former, less of the latter and a stable funding regime. We also need politicians with the courage and moral authority to tell the gutter press and its neo-fascist followers where to go when they campaign against overseas students.

Where we fail most badly is with those who achieve no qualifications at all. Sorting out problem families, poor schools and the environment which creates them should be outsourced to more competent governments.

University experience in the UK, limited to electrical & electronic engineering, and one university, on two occasions,
electrical power failed, then ONC,HNC and back again as a mature student, same university, (same tutor!) electronic engineering.
Standards do vary but always high, rather than world to bottom I would say world, to pretty good.
As a mature student with some 15 years experience I did find lecturers with limited practical knowledge which led to lively discussions about the world outside.
Did you see the Bosch report today? Did they start any differently to Joseph Lucas, Smiths Industries, British Thomson Houston,CAV, Girling?
Did Mercedes/BMW/Audi/Porche have any particular advantage over Austin, Morris, Trumph,Rover, Alvis, Bentley, Jaguar?
How did Honda, Kawasaki, manage to push Norton, BSA, AJS, Matchless off their spot without the benefit of English and a commonwealth?
How have ABB, Siemens, Schnieder, Terasaki, succeeded where GEC, English Electric, Marconi, Ferranti, AEI, didn't make it ?
Robotics and automation was going to cure it all in the 80s, and I was in robotics, we spent 20 million and closed down about four years later. Education, education, no one realised, I was alone, management hadn't a clue what was happening, the wrong decisions had been made when I arrived, electricians and technicians had had no training, perhaps since leaving school, day release for apprentices was a lark, a day off. I've lived through it all. Thatcher as well.
And here we are 21st century and wondering what to do next, start making things or brush up on our gambling skills.

All this needs some analysis to decide where the UK needs to focus it's energies. This thread is showing that it's not as simple as money versus making stuff.
Jeremy: just taking your few titles.......
Pharmaceuticals, new drugs, stem cell, medicine in general, yes they all come to London to get better,
although we don't have anything to compete with the big US centres. So we stay, and hope to stay ahead.
Defence, always a winner, sell Col Gadafi a load of arms, then watch them being destroyed. It's like selling fireworks or firewood they'll always be back for more. So we stay and hope to stay ahead.
Financial services. Good business so we stay but take out the crooks.
Enginering consultancy, let it go. When this generation have gone there'll be few who can give advice beyond the 12 times tables, I've witnessed in the middle east and far east the rise of engineering expertise, with fewer and fewer contracts going to western consultancy or project management firms. I'd say stay only in high high tech areas. But general engineering, power stations, oil & gas, pipelines, let it go.
Architecture. Along with "art", and hype in general, we stay in. If we can sell stuffed sharks to Russian billionaires and call it art, and design odd shaped buildings in stainless steel & glass for big fees, we stay in, We promote it, like London fashion week and then hand the design awards out to each other..
Real Estate, no choice here, the more developed a country the higher the price of land and labour and hence property. Economically I can never quite get my head around property inflation but if it brings in the money we stay.
Car makers, we have the skilled labour but not the skilled management, so we leave BMW to make our mini, and Nissan for our family saloons. So "we" don't return to manufacturing, "we" attract foreign firms to buy our old firms and run them efficiently with their foreign management and money.
Special engineering skills, cameras for satellites, racing car engines, lots of university spin-outs, stay in, we are good at it,
culturally we are experimenters and inventors, creators, so pump in the venture capital, but then don't try to make them here...at least not with British management.
Needs a lot of thought.

Anonymous 1 needed this 'Off the Record'

Still on life support.
In view of the responses since your piece, it appears to me that it is not just comparative advantage we want to be looking at, but also comparative disadvantage. Examples quoted are poor management, poor politicians, uneducated workforce, lack of requisite skills, poor attitudes to industry/manufacturing etc.
And they certainly have a point.
For example, the US subprime problem, which led to recession.
Private Eye and Der Spiegel were reporting it some one year before it happened. But none of our politicians were aware of it, except Vince Cable who was ignored. Alternatively, they were happy to ignore it, happy to ride the Services wave, until it hit the beach and crashed.
And what about our Business Schools? Were they sleeping?
Incidentally, that says a lot for our News and papers. Perhaps instead of reading the gutter press we should have been reading Private Eye. Perhaps, we should say NoW to some of them.
My point is, in my first submission, that there are good and bad services, and that we need to develop/add to, the good ones, whilst not allowing our comparative disadvantage destroy what is left.
As one of my students put it. The bad, smelling/rotten eggs of the Services are like a cancer. Forever spreading. As soon as you stop one another develops. the latest being PPI. Endowment Policies before for example.
All they do is feed off the patient/nation, until it dies.
Aided and abetted by the attitude, nothing to gain by trying to recapture an advantage that is FOREVER lost.

Prof Eman

Jeremy,
My London quip was prompted by my position in Kuwait until 2004, the rich Kuwaitis always made for Cromwell Road Hospital, I'm in Inverness, but I won't be drawn on Scottish inventiveness. I was born in Lancashire amongst the dark satanic mills and coal mines with even darker and more satanic owners, but an engineering tradition going back to 17th century.

Prof Eman
Nice point about business schools where were they as the dark clouds gathered. Where were the economists, government financial advisers, monetary experts? Don't we have a London School of Economics with learned staff who study these trends. As an engineer I can tell from the noise, the heat, the smell, the vibration, the instrument readings, when a plant, a generator or any system is heading for trouble, with a breakdown several months away. If only Private Eye und der Spiegel could see a crisis looming it does appear we have a serious problem with our analysists.

My own experience with newspapers and magazines with technical articles has been very unsuccessful, perhaps 50 articles rejected. Talking to editors I have had them admit that they haven't a clue what they are reporting on, they rely on press releases, publicity agents, celebrity gossip and sport, with science & technology marginalised because all media people tend to be classics students. Do you mean that no one at the Telegraph/Times/Guardian saw anything wrong with derivatives and a property bubble that had to burst?