KRISTY Dorsey's trenchant Tale of the suits and the eggheads (May 12), exploring the mutual distrust of academic and accountancy cultures which ensures Britain's unrivalled inventiveness enriches foreigners, looks for saviours in the wrong place, among British entrepreneurs.
These have largely contracted out management responsibility and decision-making abroad. Our motor industry, shipbuilding, merchant banking, electronics, even newspapers, seem to require overseas control to thrive. Mercedes, Honda, and Ferrari must come to Britain for innovative car-racing engineering, but the organisation and foresight for large-scale car manufacturing requires Japanese, American, or French supervision. Even Rolls Royce is more significant as a Stock Exchange play than as an engineering entity.
Surely it is time to explore what malign social and economic structures allowed Professor Donald's pioneering work on ultrasonic maternity scanners to found an overseas manufacturing industry, or why Aberdeen University required Japanese funding for prototypes.
The currently fashionable scheme of attempting to turn high-grade scholars into small-scale entrepreneurs will wreck the quality of both, producing vulnerable, under-capitalised companies. Better to send our apprentice entrepreneurs and Treasury civil servants abroad, to explore the structures with which foreign companies have revived our manufacturing industry with low-cost capital, so that one day British investment funds will successfully finance British innovation which seems at present only valued by overseas companies and the Nobel committees.
Then, a strong pound will matter no more than a strong D-mark or strong yen, the currencies of truly successful exporters.
D A Gray,
South Bank Coach House,
Portencross, West Kilbride.
May 13.
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