""Excuse me Bluesman. It was the tories who gave up on us. Decided it just too difficult to figure out a way to keep our mining and heavy engineering, ship building, motorbike, most of the car, most of the steel, most of the manufacturing industries going. Massive mega unemployment. Scenes of Dickensian poverty. Beggars on the street and an endemic hard drug problem.""

God almighty Al.....Where do you get your history from?

The motorbike industry invested nothing in innovation and was still selling outdated machines based on pre war technology well into the mid sixties, when Honda decided to give the buying public a machine that was twentieth century. That wasn't the fault of any government. It was entirely down to the owners of the companies.

Triumph decided that bikers could just put up with having their boots sprayed with hot oil from rocker boxes (I know 'cos I rode one for five years. BSA made no real attempt to move on from the fifties, and relied on the "Gold Star" reputation. Norton produced a new machine which used up a set of big ends in 3000 - 6000 miles.

They gave the Japanese the industry.

As to the other stuff, we've been here before. British heavy industry autodestructed on the watch of Harold Wilson, in a fury of strikes, impossible pay claims and civil disobedience, which continued through the reign of the gutless Jim Callaghan. In 1979, what was left was well past saving without massive changes that the work force wouldn't accept. End of story.

Don T.