[timwilky]

I work for a large multinational, in years gone by we employed over 50,000 in the UK. Now it is less than 4000. The vast majority of these jobs are either professional or clerical. Most of our factories have shut, We have opened new factories in "low wage" countries India and China etc.

Interestingly our customers (in china) have because of bad experience of new products manufactured in eastern Europe asked for our traditional UK manufactured equipment (10s of millions worth of kit) and been told sorry no can do.

Technical stuff like design and development is still done in the UK, but metal cutting is too expensive. If we can teach the cheap staff to innovate we are truely screwed. They can regurgitate the crap out there all they want, but cannot think on their feet. So ideal script monkeys etc.