Made in England

That bloke with the wrong way round name who deserves to die painfully for the Diana dead guy song has a song called made in England. It includes the lines:

I was made in England like a blue Cortina
&
If you're made in England, you're built to last

Which has to be total and utter proof that he knows bugger all. When did you last see a blue cortina? I could give him 10 points if he'd chosen, say, a green land rover, but cortina? The mk5 having the dubious honour of being the most scrapped car ever. Millions made, naff all survived.

Er, where was I? Ah yes, made in England. You don't see that on products any more. People will tell you it's 'cos everything is made in the far east, because they can do it cheaper and better than England ever could. These people are wrong.

I will now reveal to you why we don't have a manufacturing industry any more:
Brass plaques.

We lost it because we kept putting beautiful brass plaques on our products, and those clever foreigner types started using stickers and undercut us (due to not having to pay for brass plaques, or men to fit them), and bang! we have no industry.

I'm surprised we even won the bloody war. Exhibit a:

Note the carefully riveted on plaque?

This be a generator for a merlin plane engine. You don't need the info the plaque tells you to enable you to fit a new one, 'cos if it stops working your plane drops out of the sky and goes splat. It also feels a colossal waste of resources, given the plaque and generator, and plane it's attached to is likely to be going splat in an occupied part of Europe within months at best.

If you visit one of the museums where they have the dug up remains of a ww2 spitfire on display, you will see 1 x mangled merlin engine, 5 x rusty bits of could be anything metal, and a 1m square display board full of recovered brass plaques.

While I'm going on, I'll give you my other theory on these things. It was a simple anti German tactic. Hans shoots down your plane, but cannot steal your secrets 'cos all the plaques on everything say made using patent number.... and it wouldn't be the gentlemanly thing to copy when we got it recorded as ours first.

Despite costing us our industry, I secretly love the things. In my shed I have a lathe, built in 1942. Despite the war, it has a beautiful how to use plaque. My shed also has a modern lathe made in China that is 1 year old. The instruction stickers are peeling off already.