The financial crisis has unleashed a great debate about rebalancing Britain’s economy. The conventional wisdom is that our prosperity during the Nice decade (non-inflationary continuous expansion, that is) was over-dependent on finance and that we need to refocus our attention on high-quality manufacturing.
Under New Labour, and the Tories before them, manufacturing was allowed to wither, declining from 18 per cent of GDP in 1996 to just 12 per cent now.
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