Thanks for the links, though you might be surprised to know that I had already read the FT piece (yes, read!) only yesterday. Yes, the UK has a productivity problem, one discussed by myself on these forums in the past. However, that's not what you said prior to your narrative sobering up. You said that UK was a 'spiv capitalists wonderland dumping crap produced by people who have little or no protection under law', a bit of a travesty of the truth, if you'll forgive me. Sure, we have evolved into a services-based economy, and yes, China makes (at the moment) iPhones, and ICBMs. This is Comparative Advantage. Perhaps I'm spoiled. I have a friend who runs a successful company manufacturing satellite components and the spar sections for Airbus A220 aircraft, another who services and warehouses thousands of jet engines, both of them based here in Essex, not Essen or Shenzhen. For all of its extraordinary prowess in the engineering, automotive and pharma sectors though, you can be certain that the crappy plastic duck you have floating in your bath was made in capitalist-totalitarian China, probably using something not massively unlike slave Labours.