Anglo-American Special Relationship

I have just had the pleasure of entertaining two American friends for a few days and showing them some of the features of life in England. As I had been under the impression that we had become a more brutish and uncivilised society in recent years it was gratifying to be told by my American friends that in their opinion the opposite was the case. It was also good to know (considering the bad reputation we used to have) that our food and drink were quite acceptable!

I was brought up short one day with the question, "What, mainly, does Britain make?" Thinking about this I was faced with the unpalatable realisation that these days the answer to that question is "Not much".

In this connection it dawned on me when I took my friends to York that only a few years ago in this great City there was a beet sugar processing factory, three major confectionary factories, a railway engineering and carriage works, and a factory manufacturing glass bottles from recycled glass. All these have now closed. In other parts of the country we have watched coal mining all but disappear. The same goes with iron and steel production, and the small amount of steel manufacturing we still have is now owned by an Indian company. The British car industry has collapsed. We are still making good cars, but for companies owned by the Japanese or the Germans.

I wonder, therefore, in what way is our economy "booming" (terrorist bombs aside, that is) for apparently it is "booming". Have we just turned into a successful giant "Theme Park" for tourists? Apart from that, then the rest of our success seems to be mostly down to financial services.

Anyway, this is all depressing me, and I want to be optimistic about the future, and remind myself that the two Americans who came to see us, and who gave us such a memorable and pleasurable time, enjoyed their experience of my country.