"Despite all the talent in engineering and work in our universities, I fear Britain still suffers from an anti-manufacturing bias.
The way to support British businesses who want to lead in the industries of the future isn’t for government to do nothing. Government action can make a difference, and government inaction can make life harder".
As the new Labour leader is in his honeymoon period, but did anyone bother telling him that between 1997 and 2007, manufacturing as a proportion of national wealth reduced from 20.7 per cent of the UK economy to 12.7 per cent.
In Wales, it went from 27.6 per cent of the economy in 1997 to 17.6 per cent of the economy in 2007.
Is that what he meant by government action to support manufacturing?
It is also worth noting, and something that the Labour Party finds hard to deal with, that the contribution of manufacturing to the economy under John Major's administration stayed approximately the same across the UK and actually increased in Wales.
