Manufacturing

There are signs that firms are repatriating manufacturing to the U.K because greater efficiency, improved quality, lower transport costs and greater reliability of delivery make this country once again a competitive manufacturing base. This is a profoundly good piece of news for the potential quality of economic recovery and of huge strategic importance to our future economic health.

If the momentum can be sustained it will benefit our balance of payments and push exports back into the driving force. It will create real jobs for people which really do add value to to the national wealth, rather than simply inflate existing assets. It offers the potential to create jobs in deprived communities to restore social and economic cohesion in these disgraceful blackspots. It will mean we make more of what we buy.

It will also create the employment opportunities away from the financial services and legal sector which have contributed so adversely to the creation of our current medieval economic model which sucks money from the poor and showers it over the rich.

This is just a beginning and a ham fisted government could wreck it. But a beginning it is and good news to come at the end of a year of a glut of bad tidings.