Still stuck on sell not make
11 January 2011
Britain’s role as a nation of shop-keepers is to be preserved...
That would appear to be where the short-term future of the country lies in the eyes of the Prime Minister.
This is not a new subject for me, but the context is new. I am drawing my conclusions from the guest list for the meeting of business leaders that was held at the beginning of this week at Downing Street. The 19 companies invited are: ASDA, Amec, Balfour Beatty, Centrica, Co-Op, Hays, InterContinental Hotels, Jaguar Land Rover, John Lewis, Kingfisher, Marks and Spencer, McDonalds, Microsoft, Mitie Group, Morrisons, J. Sainsbury, Shell, Tesco, and Toyota.
If you take out the two automotive companies, and don’t include hamburgers, construction projects and a good shopping experience as something that is ‘made’ in a manufacturing sense, I think this list is a bleak reflection on this government’s view of the way forward.
Any contact between politicians and the real world has to be welcomed, and so this ‘jobs summit’ should be a positive thing. However, we simply cannot rely on the retail sector to provide a future for generations to come. In the short term we are likely to see unemployment rise and wages frozen – not an ideal environment for a consumer-led recovery.
And, banging the same old drum, real financial stability in the UK economy will only come when we rebuild the foundations that have been dismantled by successive governments over the past thirty years. Manufacturing and technology are the key sectors and there are a host of SMEs out there, frustrated by red-tape, stagnating through lack of credit, handicapped by poor local supply chains, disincentivised to make capital investments or expand workforces… I could go on. More importantly there are a host of owners of these businesses who could ‘go on’ with a far more precise list of requirements than I could supply. These are the people that the Prime Minister should be talking to because they are the people that will provide permanent, well-paid and desirable jobs that also help underpin the UK economy.
Sadly I think the ‘jobs summit’ consists of companies who can make headline grabbing promises of a thousand jobs here or there. Such jobs, at the supermarkets for example, are not the sort of jobs that have any real longevity or benefit to the country and are unlikely to stimulate the minds of the huge numbers of public sector workers who are unwillingly about to switch to the private sector. But they will be jobs in sufficient numbers for the government to claim that its strategy is working.
At a time when the high-tech and manufacturing sectors need real support and guidance, I fear the jobs summit may be no more than (shop) window dressing.
NB - As promised in Great gear for the new year a post-CES blog will follow soon.
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