Features editor
Certain subjects were conspicuously missing from party leaders’ speeches in the current conference season: and they are ones which are of interest to the engineering and manufacturing sectors
The somewhat strident tone emerging from recent political party conferences can leave us in no doubt: the next General Election is coming. In fact, for the first time ever, we know exactly when it’s going to be. Thanks to the new fixed-term parliaments, introduced just after the last election, we know for sure that it’s eight months away. So now begins our regular but increasingly difficult ritual of trying to insert a cigarette-paper between the main parties’ policies that will affect the science, technology, engineering and manufacturing sectors and those who work in them.
And what we can see so far from the Labour and Conservative conferences is that the party chiefs obviously don’t think that STEM policy is something that really bothers voters, because wrack our brains though we do, we can’t really think of anything either party has said which indicates it’s crossed their minds. The main leaders’ speeches mainly focused on matters which affect individuals, such as tax rates, or on health policy (related, but somewhat tangential to engineering concerns) or on defence, which at least showed that at least one major manufacturing sector needn’t worry about demand collapsing for a while. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, as the adage says.

One interesting bit of PR that’s landed in our inboxes this week was from the manufacturers’ organisation, the EEF, which with its tongue firmly in its cheek worked out a ‘politicians’ bingo card’ of terms that they thought the parties’ leaders and economics and industry spokesmen were likely to use in their speeches. Somewhat against expectations, this highlighted something rather interesting: neither David Cameron, George Osborne, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls nor Chuka Umunna mentioned the terms rebalancing, resource security, productivity or energy costs in their speeches, although they did mention manufacturing, innovation, exports, technology and skills. In the last round of unchallenged speeches they’re going to make before the election, we can be sure that the subjects they would touch on were considered carefully (unless they were in the part of Ed Miliband’s speech that he forgot to deliver) so we can probably surmise that these are things the party strategists don’t think that voters care about much.
”The big trumpeting elephant in the room is one subject that the speeches did touch on: EU reform
The big trumpeting elephant in the room is one subject that the speeches did touch on: EU reform. There’s doubtless an element of running scared from UKIP in this; the newcomer party has one big policy that affects engineering and that’s getting out of the EU. The large industry leaders are pretty much united in their opposition to this idea, as is the Labour party; the Conservatives’ policy is to offer an in-out referendum and to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership, although so far they’ve been very vague over what this will mean in practical terms (maybe they think we don’t care, or they’re waiting for their favourite tabloid newspapers to tell them what to do). But there can be no doubt that Britain’s relationship with our main trading partners is the most important engineering-related factor that’s up for discussion in this long election campaign.
When it comes to energy, the parties are so close together as to be virtually indistinguishable. Labour’s short-term freeze in energy prices shouldn’t have much effect on energy projects, as it’s finite, well-defined and therefore easy to factor into plans; so we can expect business as usual in nuclear projects, offshore wind farms and fossil-fuel technology development whoever wins the election.
But the lack of mention of rebalancing is a concern. The economy is still not balanced; finance and services outweigh manufacturing and still exert a disproportionate influence on the economy. We are not free of the risk of another financial crash, and that has to be a concern for anyone whose livelihoods depend on the stability of the economy (everyone in the private sector, in other words). The fact that our politicians didn’t think it worth mentioning is a distinct concern. Have they run out of ideas? Are they hoping to return to the laisséz-faire policies and let ‘the market’ work it out? Or do they just think that voters don’t care? We’ll be keeping an eye on them until next spring.
But…one word that one Leader did use was ‘Imperial’ in a tweet: a suggestion that ‘we’ should return to a system of measuring length and mass by it. Perhaps as we are still preparing and paying for delusions of grandeur that ‘we’ are still an Imperial power, the need to return to that system of measurement follows. I seem to recall that in the 70s the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Enginers) Codes did seek to move the US to gradually accepting metrication. They failed. Presumably that is why US exports of just about everything manufactured except ‘you know what’ are so relatively small.
It really is so basic, that all the world should operate on the same measurement system: sadly, like too many other aspects of apparent ‘speciality’ -“its what makes us who we are?” those with an interest in maintaining their patch will resist common sense to the end.
Mike B
Regarding the Trumpeting Elelphant, it really does not matter what the details of the negotiated reforms are, having got to that stage and the question is put in the Referendum, In/Out? The voting masses will cast their vote irrespective of those details.
Here is some inspiration on how we got politicians talking and acting on manufacturing in the US:
http://www.mfgday.com/
Then you have Ed B to Ed M- “Don’t mention the deficit- I did, but I think I got away with it.” Admittedly, any intelligent person knows they’d be far worse at running the country than Basil Fawlty was a running a hotel, but there seem to be plenty of Labour’s traditional braying fools lining up to replace Miss Gatsby and Miss Tibbs “Oh, thank you for stuffing it all up again. We really don’t know what we’d do without you.”
Alternatively, it was Milliband’s subconscious knowing he’s unfit to be in any position of influence saying “Don’t mention the deficit, they’ll only laugh at you.”
Sadly for us of course, we cannot return to the only PM to improve British industry in the last fifty years- Margaret Thatcher. Under whom output and efficiency both increased, and we got rid of the nationalised industries which were not producing anything anyway (which came as a relief to me, having worked in one, but escaping before being paid a king’s ransom to stop doing nothing).
Mike Blamey- I don’t disagree that we should be working in metric units. However, the reason is not just commonaility with our enemies in and trade deficit with Europe, it’s because they work better as a system. US exports being “relatively small” does rather fly in the face of the achievements, say, of their aircraft industry, where against the moast blatantly subsidised and protected Airbus consortium, such as Boeing do have a measure of high value export success.
It is however absolutley vital that Imperial units be taught as well, since there are so many things still measured in said units- road distances, car tyres and bike wheels amongst others, where it is useful to know the circumstances under which 27″ is rather counter intuitively larger than 700mm. Also, a knowledge of both systems may improve the horrendous ignorance which had the interviewer on the article you mention refer to weighing things in kilobgrams.
The old currency system and the system of weights and measures at least promoted a good level of mental arithmetic amongst the general population. My Gran could freely convert from Base20 to Base12 to Base10 in her head as in “£1.57 1/2, thats 31′ 6d!!!!” and my Dad who worked thorugh the change to decimal sysytem could without drawing breath convert between thousandths of an inch and mm from 0.001″ to 150mm. and I guess thous who worked with lbs and oz could do the same
I was at Liberal Democrats conference and Engineering and Manufacturing, STEM education and apprentices were all very much on the agenda, as was sustainability for the economy, manufacturing, housing, and energy.
It was good to join in the debates, be able to question the ministers directly, and be able to influence party policy.
Vince Cable is very definately leading the charge for manufacturing despite as he says being held back by the Tories. Other ministers and MP are pushing it in their areas of expertese.
We had several of the institutions (IET, IMechE, IOM3, IOP, etc) there and joining in fringe debates, and contribution to main debate motions.
I go along completely with Frederick the Average’s comment(s) about mental arithmetic. I claim the same skill as his ‘Gran’: though some of that came from having my knuckles rapped with a ruler for making mistakes at age 6.
[That type of rapping was not melodic but very painful]
I believe we are all singing from the same hymnal [am I allowed to say that?] -and even though uniformity is NOT normally something I aspire to, in these very basics, I do.
I give you the weapons part(s) of US aircraft exports -I think? But I notice few household/consumer items from that stable in Europe.
We all speak the same language -English- (well don’t we) so communication between us as humans is easy! Well isn’t it? No it isn’t. That is why we have to pay special persons (who use different meanings of words to us ordinary folk, proles, plebs, lower-orders, riff-raff, voters, litigants….you see what I mean…) to talk for us. And make their living doing so.
Mike B
I am reminded of the remark made by an outstanding craft apprentice at Woods of Colchester when asked by the apprentice master -this was 1959 and they still had them-
[put on Essex accent now!]
“Titch, how many thousandths are there in an inch?”
“E, them’s so small, there must be ‘undreds of ’em!”
Do I not recall that our Engineering and tool-maker ancestors used terms such as ‘a full 16th’ and ‘a bare 32nd’ to define tolerances in former times.
best
Mike B
“Are they hoping to return to the laisséz-faire policies and let ‘the market’ work it out?”
Yes is the simple answer to this question. Back in the 1980s the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal parties all had distinctive policies. In the 1990s all three of these parties converged on what is best described as the dead centre of politics defined as a liberal social policy combined with a laissez-faire free market economic policy. The battle between the three establishment parties today is no longer over policy (apart from possibly the war on terror) but over the provision of public services. Therefore it is no surprise to anybody who knows about politics to find engineering and manufacturing conspicuously missing from the establishment political party conferences. Such industries are just left to the free market. An additional factor is EU competition law which effectively forces a laissez-faire economic policy because if national governments decided to implement their own national economic policies to nurture and develop certain industries or work in favour of the people then they will fall foul of the EU Commissioners.
The reality is come May 2015 there will be other choices on the ballot slip – such as the Green Party, UKIP, English Democrats, and the SNP – to vote for, all of which have distinctively different policies from the Lib-Lab-Con establishment, but it isn’t convention for formal publications like The Engineer to provide serious coverage of these parties and their policies.
“Or do they just think that voters don’t care?”
Place an emphasis on the word think.