Technology revives British industrial might

British manufacturing could be on the verge of a renaissance

Now that the dust of the financial crash has settled, Britain must decide what to do with itself. Brush the flash City cats down and plonk them back on their fat thrones? There's an option. Pack them off to the colonies on the next prison ship? Agreement might prove elusive on some matters, but on at least one point the country has a consensus. An insubstantial faith in services got us into this mess, and only science, engineering and technology will get us out of it.

"We need less financial engineering and more real engineering," business secretary Lord Mandelson said in his speech at the recent Labour Party conference. The Conservatives say as much, though not having the public purse they cannot claim £750m investment in tech research. Nevertheless, this refrain has been reverberating around Britain's sci-tech community like the bagpipes at Rorke's Drift, as the 10th annual Cambridge Enterprise Conference at the University's Churchill College last month made apparent.

Delegates at the conference - advisors, middlemen, moneymen - were feeling what there was of terra firma after the crash and finding the stuff of Britain: a manufacturing heritage to make your eyes go misty. But the technologists in the exhibition area were, as ever, merely hoping to secure some investment so that they could start manufacturing.

This contrast demonstrated how the romance and the reality of British manufacturing are in conflict. It was a latent theme of the conference, and one that will decide whether Britain can make the success it would claim for its sci-tech industries.

It stems from the reasons why manufacturing is back in the fore after being the unfashionable cousin of services for so long. Dennis Turner, chief economist at HSBC, told the Cambridge conference delegates that this was because manufacturing was the only "sensible" way for Britain to make any sustainable recovery from the recession.

Some 80 per cent of the recent boom had been based on the retail, construction and financial services industries, he explained. It had been almost entirely dependent on domestic spending and this is where it fell down. There was little other money to invest in export industries and, since the country earned less in trade, determined shoppers used debt instead of hard readies. The rest we know from recent history.

Had Britain invested more money in widgets than it spent on manbags, in other words, it wouldn't be in such a precarious position as it is now. The way out of recession, then, was to boost exports. "It's a global game," Turner told V3.co.uk after the conference. "And there's nothing very global about retailing."

Manufacturing decline
British manufacturing might be back in fashion now, but 10 years ago it had been consigned to history. It was given a revered place in the national narrative alongside the war dead. Manufacturing, on which Britain founded the industrial revolution, built an empire, won two world wars, and established a labour movement, all destroyed by Thatcher, or so the story goes.

The crash has since altered the narrative. Steve Bone, chief executive of nu Angle, an R&D consultancy, graduated with a year of first-class chemists from Cambridge in the 1980s, only to be tempted with the rest into high-pay banking and consulting jobs. Post-war industry, meanwhile, was being run by " classics graduates", "accountants, and asset strippers". Other scientists and engineers were enticed abroad and Britain's flagship industries declined, Bone told V3.co.uk in the apt location of the Churchill College bar.

Collar someone over 50 and ask them about British manufacturing and you will soon be wanting a drink, especially if they are a northerner. You will hear of once-productive greatness transformed into a vast shopping centre.