What does britain produce

They include declines in business investments, as well as the prospect of less access to foreign markets. This has spurred declines in the exchange rate that are raising inflation and reducing consumer income, and as a result, consumer income and spending are contributing less to economic growth. After initially announcing the intention to pursue a strategy of protecting the vulnerable while building herd immunity, the U.

Subsequently, the U. GDP experienced a record Amidst the highly restrictive government measures in response to the pandemic, these declines were particularly prevalent in sectors most exposed to the government restrictions, including services, production, and construction.

The larger economic decline in the U. Office for National Statistics. The World Bank. Accessed April 1, House of Commons Library. The UK service sector. Visit Britain. Department for International Trade. Institute for Government. Centre for European Reform. Office for Budget Responsibility.

Imperial College London. The Guardian. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. Other statistics on the topic. Economy Value of trade in goods imports UK , by commodity.

Profit from additional features with an Employee Account. Please create an employee account to be able to mark statistics as favorites. Then you can access your favorite statistics via the star in the header.

Profit from additional features by authenticating your Admin account. Then you will be able to mark statistics as favourites and use personal statistics alerts. Please log in to access our additional functions. Yes, let me download! Exclusive Corporate feature.

Corporate Account. Statista Accounts: Access All Statistics. Basic Account. Nearly three million jobs, approximately 1. More than 7, U. United Kingdom - Country Commercial Guide. Market Overview. Last published date: And as far as correcting the critical weakness of the British economy went, the Thatcherites had a clear answer. In a word: competition. In , Keith Joseph — the man Margaret Thatcher described as her closest political friend — gave a speech in which the key section was titled "Growth Means Change".

He argued that British industry was "overmanned" with "too low earnings and too little profit and too little investment". The answer lay in shedding factory workers, which would make industrial companies leaner and free up labour for new businesses. The working population must choose between narrow illusory job security in one place propped up by public funds or the real job security based on a prosperous dynamic economy.

Five years later, the Conservatives encouraged just that process: first came an austerity programme that saw nearly one in four of all manufacturing jobs disappear within Thatcher's first term.

Then followed privatisations and an economic policy geared towards a housing boom and the City. Despite Joseph's assertions, the middle-aged engineers who were laid off didn't go away and become software engineers — they largely landed up in worse jobs or on the scrapheap. But it was with Tony Blair that the argument for moving from industry to services shifted from one of dire necessity to being an altogether more optimistic vision about Britain's place in the world.

The architects of New Labour were convinced that the future lay in what they called the "knowledge economy". Mandelson declared Silicon Valley his "inspiration"; Brown swore he would make Britain e-commerce capital of the world within three years.

Again, the theme was simple: most of what could be manufactured could be done so more cheaply elsewhere. The future lay in coming up with the ideas, the software, and most of all, the brands. Once the British had sold cars and ships to the rest of the world; now they could flog culture and tourism and Lara Croft. The odd thing is that all this techno-utopianism came from men who would struggle to order a book off Amazon. Alistair Campbell tells a story about how Blair got his first-ever mobile phone after stepping down as prime minister in His first text to Campbell read: "This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.

But Blair and Brown had plenty of advisers and consultants and thinktankers to help them stay cutting-edge. One of the most interesting walk-ons was played by an American academic called Richard Florida , who comes up time and again in this saga. Florida argued that the successful regions of the future would be driven by what he called a "creative class" of young people living in city centres.

And there was an even groovier elite termed the "super-creative core". It was always a daft argument: ask Florida who was in this "super-creative core" and he'd suggest all sorts of occupations that didn't sound especially groovy, such as IT support staff.

But what really stuck out was how Florida fenced off creative work. You were either a knowledge worker or a factory worker — as if the other stuff didn't require brains. And running through a lot of the knowledge-economy talk was a carelessness, bordering on contempt, for what people did.

That was echoed in the stark choice that Labour presented workers in this entrepreneurial, innovative young country: brain up, or get written off. There is a popular argument which holds that all the rot in the British economy began in I don't believe that. Nor am I spinning a tale of leonine industrialists being led by Westminster donkeys. Pearson Engineering's Tom Clark has a good story about how the firm's previous owners used to handle industrial relations.

Every time the workforce went on strike, which was often, one of the Pearsons would buy a new Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and drive through the picket line, waving two fingers at his own staff. The real charge against Blair and Brown is that, rather than focus on this problem of underpeforming managers and shareholders, they chased the fantasy of the knowledge economy. In their wake trailed a whole phalanx of propagandists.

Take Tyneside's regional development agency, One North East.