2015 UK General Election

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Sorry I think that's nonsense. We have a majority tertiary sector economy, sure, but we still have a vast manufacturing base which exports several billions of goods each year.

Manufacturing in the 80s died, yes, but it evolved and changed into high end manufacturing as that was the only viable way it would survive. And survive it has, and flourished.

The reasons for the credit crisis and subsequent recession are more nuanced than simply a lack of exports. One area is the over supply of housing capital coupled with a flooring of the demand led to the loss of billions in the markets which collapsed several credit based industries (housing and sub prime Markets). But the UK economy is interlinked with every other nation in the world and so naturally the ability of any state to 'recover' is constrained by that.

In fact we look are exports we export more now than we did 10 years ago.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/exports

BOP are net imports but crucially the amount we export is still staggering:

https://www.uktradeinfo.com/Statistics/E...EuOTS.aspx

I don't know where this story of the UK not having a manufacturing base comes from but it's poppycock.