1974
The only reason to take that year as a heading is because it is the year Sir James Dyson first produced his famous “Ball” Wheelbarrow.
It wasn’t his first invention – that was the SeaTruck developed NOT with his future father-in-law. Jeremy Fry is erroneously quoted as such but in fact his wife is Deirdre Hindmarsh and has been since 1968. The SeaTruck was made by Rotork who paid Dyson £300 for the design. Design has always been Dyson’s “thing”. He studied at the Royal College of Art and specifically Industrial design. But the BallBarrow was his first venture into commercial production and on his own account in a 50/50 partnership.
The point of this preamble is to highlight what Sir James is on record as saying . When he was looking to get his design turned into reality, he wandered around Birmingham for a couple of days and was able to organise every single component from one or another of the myriad of small engineering works in the city. All making things, making money and giving employment.
As the father of modern economics Adam Smith wrote, we should “Allow every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”. And that is very much what we used to do in this country.
The moral of the tale is that when he was onto his next invention, his eponymous suction vacuum, he tried the same thing, only to discover that he was unable to access what he needed. Arguably the tech required was of a different calibre, but the basic manufacturing was little different. The small businesses had gone. As that would have been post 1979 and the advent of Mrs. Thatcher, there is the thought that maybe she destroyed them. Personally, I doubt it very much. There was a different requirement by the early 1980s and small engineering workshops were not it. From anecdotal evidence many of these workshops had started after the war, so by 1980 the owners would have been in their sixties at least and ripe for retirement. There had also been a drop in the number of children prepared to follow father’s footsteps. But the point remains that those skills and specific abilities were simply not fit for purpose for making a high tech cleaner. For cost reasons, all his manufacturing was moved out of UK around 2000, but even before then only some of the work was done in UK. The Phillipines, Malaysia and Korea are the main manufacturing bases.
My point here is that Dyson (a great British success story) relies on overseas trade to make what it does. In reality, I doubt there are ANY products nowadays wholly manufactured within the UK. They all rely on imports, and especially if they are merely assemblers. Manufacturers in the UK have been sacrificed on the altar of cheapness. It’s why we need to reinstitute free trade as the number one principle of our economy.
That’s as it should be. But why are we so much more expensive, even taking transport from the far east into account? The answer lies in the red tape that engulfs doing anything in this country. I listened to a very good interview with Arthur Laffer (he of the Laffer curve) where, although he fulminated against taxes, he was even more damning of red tape. We are very good at red tape in this country, and I regret to say that the nettle was not grasped after Brexit. In fact, there’s even more now than there was then. You can also add in all the extras like the highest electricity prices almost anywhere in the world, taxes that disincentivise the workforce and the need to employ “consultants” if you want to put a path down somewhere and you have a perfect storm of non-enterprise.
Laffer makes it clear he didn’t invent the Laffer curve. It’s been known about since taxes began hundreds if not thousands of years ago. And it was a journalist called Jude Wanniski who first used the expression in 1978, after Laffer drew it on a napkin at dinner in 1974. The concept is arrestingly simply and intuitively understandable, which is why it always astonishes me that Governments pay little or no attention to it. I regret to say that taxes are largely ideologically levied as opposed to rationally constructed. Somehow we have managed to get to 25,000 – Twenty Five THOUSAND -pages of tax regulations. We in the UK have literally thousands of pages of taxes and about the same again in exemptions. As he says you could do away with all these pages if you simply had a low-rate flat tax which covered the largest possible number of people. In this respect, changing the income tax rate at the upcoming budget would be fairer, prevent even more fiddling at the edges and raise more money with less evasion than anything else. Rachel from Accounts has said as has the Manifesto that the “big three” won’t be altered. That’s Income tax, vat and national insurance. Personally, I wouldn’t put a lot of money on a bet saying they won’t be. But there has, as the MSM have said, been a hokey cokey. Maybe she will maybe she won’t but she has no real idea whether its good bad or indifferent. There’s a lovely children’s book by the late Frank Muir about a wonderful Afghan puppy whose mother referred to him as “What a mess – but you are a dear”. And the puppy immediately took it he WAS a deer complete with antlers. That’s a bit like the way our economy is being run.
