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Comment by rowanajmarshall | Hacker News Reader

The UK's value-add economy is overwhelmingly based in capital-intensive, highly skilled industries, think stuff like finance, tech, high-end engineering and manufacturing. These all strongly favour places like London and the South East with high concentrations of highly-educated (if expensive) people and capital. Outside of localised service jobs (think retail, education, trades, that kind of thing) we don't really have competitive mass employment industries. That economic reality is gonna keep holding back regional UK until we find something suiting their situation. Government spending can paper over some of it, but it's not a permanent solution.

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It's reasonable to say we need to focus on export industries, but I don't think it's as automatic as you assume that they should be concentrated in the south east. Manufacturing and engineering have traditionally been more of a Midlands thing.

_Higher_ education is actually an export industry in the sense that foreigners spend lots of money on it, but the government hates it for various reasons and it's currently on strike as a result.

The North could have benefitted from a manufacturing renaissance, and reshoring in general, but Brexit put a damper on all that...

Ironically the North voted leave, one of the reasons was to “stick” it to London and drive investment in the North. I say ironically because it was plainly obvious that when the tories got what they wanted, the rest of the country, except for London, was in for a hard time.

So ironic that London hedge funds might be the only beneficiaries of Brexit.

I went to a great museum in Coventry about all the things they used to be build in the West Midlands. Some really cool cars, including that crazy six wheel Jag F1 car, but left feeling sad, it was like an obituary to their manufacturing industries.

The midlands still has: - Jaguar Land Rover - Aston Martin - Polestar - London Taxi Co - Lotus

That’s what I can think of off the top of my head and there a plenty of automotive suppliers and start ups in the area

UK automotive is a massive industry and still very relevant in the midlands.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_motor_v...

Not really, Mexico made three times as many cars as the UK in 2021.

You named many companies, I'll ignore their foreign ownership, but Lotus, London Taxi ,Jaguar, and Aston are low volume

Notice how the UK tends to have "high value low volume" car industries, and/or car industries with foreign management? I have a theory that this is the legacy of the industrial relations disaster of the past decades. British management + British workers = far more class strife than an overseas owner that just want to make cars and not conduct class warfare against its own staff. Less prevalent in small companies (under Dunbar's number) because people can know one another as people.

I don’t think it’s class strife that caused it, most management on site is British. In reality it’s just about where the money is globally and where conglomerates who are willing to buy car companies are in the world.

Calling JLR low volume seems odd given they produce over 500,000 cars a year. I also never said that it was the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, just that it was a large sector in the UK, which it measurably is.

Aston isn’t owned by an international firm, they have heavy Daimler investment but for all intents and purposes they are independent (although I can’t see it staying that way for long they desperately need the weight of a larger firm backing them - like Lotus has)

> Not really, Mexico made three times as many cars as the UK in 2021.

I completely agree the UK focuses more on low-volume, high-value automotive, bit looking at that table UK car production has more than halved since the Brexit referendum went through. The hollowing out of the UK car industry is a very recent phenomena.

Given that world wide production is down but 15 million vehicles (nearly 20%) I wouldn’t read too much into it. JLR have had enormous supply chain issues and Nissan is in a model transition on Qashqai (which alone has previously accounted for over 400k vehicles per year)

Traditionally, sure, but even while places like the Midlands and the North West have more manufacturing than the Southeast, the Southeast kept the more valuable stuff. The reshoring we're seeing as globalisation retreats is an opportunity, but I don't trust this government to make the best of it.

And education is awesome, which of course is why we strictly limit building around our top university towns and cities.

UK needs to re industrialise. Post-industrial societies seem to have been in general a failure.

Still waiting to see the benefits of the “northern powerhouse”.

The "Northern Powerhouse Rail" seems like a good start ... if they actually bother to implement it. It's looking quite unlikely though, hell even HS2 might get further cuts.

Less northerners coming down to London, taking all the good jobs and moaning that $500,000 could buy them a mansion in the north.

You realise this makes you look about 5x worse than the fictional, abstract "moaning" Geordie or Yorkshireman or Scot or whatever you described? Honestly, "taking all the good jobs" what nonsense.

"Bloody <out group>, coming over here, taking our jobs."

They dont even speak the language or understand our culture.

What about finance is capital intensive?

The edging part for instance ? You need piles of assets in various financial operations.

The capital? The finance industry is literally made out of capital?

https://www.theglobalcity.uk/resources/asset-management : "With £11.6tn of assets under management, it is the second largest centre overall, after the USA"

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