Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
It has been difficult to buy British made goods for quite a while now.
When it was possible to buy british made domestic equipment......that is what I would choose.
Everything, but everything, today seems to be manufactured in China.
We exported jobs when we sent machinery made by Howard and Bulloughs abroad many years ago....no-one thought of the knock on effect of doing that.......big companies had export departments with the prime aim of securing buyers overseas.
We have lost our manufacturing base....and if we hadn't, we would not be able to compete with the prices of goods made in countries where the labour is cheap....well unless imported goods carried a swingeing import tax.
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The sad effect of Globalisation...it's the same all over. If you go to Venice and want to buy some Murano glass as a souvenir, most of the small pieces are industrially made in China and imported into Italy -so much for hand-crafted Italian glass-wear traditionally going back centuries. Cremona (where I live) is a world center of excellence for the production of hand-made violins -at the Stradivarius International School for Violin Making in town, over half the students are Chinese or Koreans who then go back to their countries and apply the techniques they've learned to mass production -under-cutting the costs of what is made here so only the very top musicians can now afford a violin made here.
Cheap'n'cheerful has become a by-word for many but I still go by my Grand-mother's maxim which was to always buy the best quality you can afford and above all only to buy what you need and when you have saved up to buy it..