It is sad to see the decline of manufacturing and engineering in the UK, successive governments both Labour and Conservative have ignored the fact the the UK has some of the finest engineering universities and colleges in the world and have failed to get younger people into engineering. Those same educational establishments are having ther funding cut at the same time.

The engineering apprenticeship fell victim to unions demanding the close to the same wages as a skilled person for the apprentices, making the those companies who did have engineering apprenticeships pull out because of the much higher costs.

I recently went to a number of exhibitions here in China, we were the only British company present. If you looked at the large stands which the German, French, and Spanish governments sponsor it makes you feel quite depressed that our own government seems to only ever see the UK as a place from which to supply finance services, lawyers, and other so called service industries.

Schools do not seem to be able to provide a real basis from which to get into engineering and besides which you can earn more money as a lawyer, banker or an accountant. Without new engineers we will have no new engineering industry, without that there will be less and less employment opportunity for manufacturing workers.

Without good engineers existing companies products will lack improvements or their production methods will not be optimised to produce savings and therefore better margins. The products become dated, lose sales and ultimately the company will close as no one will want to buy old designs with poor reliability.

If the Chinese do still buy MG Rover who's to say that the manufacturing will remain in the UK and not be moved to China anyway? With the low cost of labour here and the high cost of cars then manufacturing in China is a no brainer.

BTW as an indicator I bought a GM Sail, the closest equivalent is a Corsa or a Berlinetta. Made here in Shanghai and the price was still about 2000 pounds higher than it would have been in the UK.