Wednesday, 29 July 2026

Open Letter post Brexit 2021

I'm catching up on Fashion Round Table open letters such as this one Post-Brexit in 2021

VAT fracture was my experience of Brexit. It's in the open letter for exports.

For the sake of UK fashion brands ... If they sell B2C online to EU customers, these customers are now charged with VAT, duties and handling fees amounting to an additional 30% on top of the product price, making them less likely to continue buying from UK brands. This will impact UK SMEs who cannot afford to pay EU distributors and use online sales platforms, the most.

Oddly enough, the new EU €3 tariff isn't so much of a problem. Send.Royalmail.com can add the money if I give enough detail about what I'm sending. They copied software written quickly to pay a new Trump tariff in the US. I wrote to their help desk on 20th of July 2026 to ask if they can help with VAT now, as a substitute for the slow expensive systems that have cropped-up gradually, usually based on DHL.

Thank you for contacting Royal Mail.

After reading through your case notes I can see that you would like to find out if there is a way to pay French VAT charges in advance.

I am sorry to say that at present Royal Mail/Parcelforce do not offer this type of service. The intended recipient in France will receive some form of notification from the French Customs.

I am sorry that on this occasion I could not provide you with a more favourable response to your enquiry. . If you require any further assistance in the future please feel free to visit our Help and Support

The same goes for importing, if I am not registered for VAT. I pay Italian VAT on boots. Then the courier charges VAT on import. If I ask the seller whether they can knock-off the VAT, it depends which country and what kind of VAT export scheme exists and the supplier has time to use, but the general rule is that they'll only do it if I have a UK VAT number.

I saw there was a UK government response to the open letter.

Prior to 31 December 2020, VAT was due on goods sold to consumers from the UK to the EU through the VAT return system. VAT was either due in the EU Member States or in the UK, and was remitted to the relevant tax authority through a VAT return.

From 1 January, the UK has left the Single Market and the EU Customs Union. Items moving between countries normally attract customs duty and import VAT (where applicable) in the country of importation.

[section on the UK Trade and Co-Operation Agreement and how it dealt with tariffs went here].

Exports of goods from Great Britain to the EU are zero-rated for UK VAT, and the importer of goods into an EU Member State may incur a charge of VAT. The tax treatment of these goods upon importation into the EU is a matter for the EU. Note that the EU VAT Directive requires Member States to exempt imports of goods of negligible value from VAT. Further information can be found on the European Commission website under taxation and Customs Union.

So the system might just work for a lorry load of goods sent by a courier that can do the administration, but it is so creaky for one-off parcels that trade ceased, just as there isn't much trade with other countries that don't have a generous tax-free minimum import. The problem is that even if a few exporters make the system work and pay in advance, others won't and EU customers give-up on any UK-made product for fear of it coming with an extra VAT and collection bill and a note to collect from a sorting office.

This wouldn't matter if I could buy from the UK - safety boots for example. There used to be a couple of big factories making them cheaply here, in Bristol and Rushden. Unfortunaly, exchange-rate hikes make it very difficult to manufacture anything in the UK and both firms closed after one exchange-rate hike or another. There is also a problem getting UK consumers to recognise that UK manufacturing can be a feel-good choice with ethical advantages. This applies to retail customer, and wholesale ones who can be capricious and take their order to another factory or another country; small factories face a boom and bust existance which would lessen if wholesale customers could use UK origins as more of a sales point, and took pride in nurturing suppliers. (The example that comes to mind is East End Manufacturing, which I knew as a small shareholder.)

There's another problem of a government that prioratises the "creative economy", which is that non-manufacturing sides of fashion get on the same lobby letter, sometimes arguing in opposite directions.

Different lobby points for different activities: mass retail.

Oxford Economics and the £35 billion figure that fashion "contributes"

The retailers have their "35 billion" figure for things like clothes shop turnover, expanded to include things like PR and advertising and quite a small amount of UK manufacuring. I think there's another Oxford Economics repord with a lower figure produced for UK Fashion and Textiles in 2023 that mentions "barriers to procurement", so these reports are not all bad. The trouble with including so much retail in the figure is that if people didn't spend money in clothes shops they'd spend it somewhere else, maybe somewhere where the money circulates more often round the UK economy than a pounds spent on Bangladeshi textiles in Next or on Temu. I suppose I should keep quiet about this as a retailer myself - although I sell things made in the UK - but there's another odd group....

London Fashion Week trying to "put London on the map"

London Fashion Week civil servants who "put London on the map" at some cost including a kind of crowding-out of attention to real life manufacturing or small business. They also add to crowding on the Picadilly Line and count that as one of their measurable benefits. Really. I have done freedom of information requests to check! They claim footfall and column inches as signs of success.

If the whole event could close, or start showing fashion made closer to home with names of the factories included on the stands, and if the export credit from UK Trade and Investment was well monitored, maybe we'd get some benefit from them. If exhibitors were nominated by UK factories, so the ones who were good customers got nominated, that would be better still.

Oddly enough, this was mentioned in the exchange of letters. Civil servants and ministers are led to believe that British Fashion Council is something to do with the sector:

Secondly, we are unable to liaise with the British Fashion Council, as they are not as responsive as we, or you, need. Whilst we appreciate their dedication to British design talent, new emerging designers and creating export opportunities for these brands overseas, they do not represent the entire fashion industry. London Fashion Week is a twice yearly event, which for the modelling industry represents no more than 3% of their business and this is echoed across the sector. They do not have the entire fashion sector's interest as their core remit, unlike Fashion Roundtable. For example, if you are a machinist in Leicester, a model in Manchester, own a shopping complex in the West Country, a modest fashion company in Leeds, a denim brand in Cardiff, a brand in Liverpool, a manufacturer in Halifax, a fashion tech company in the Midlands, a boutique owner in Brighton, a stylist in London, a fashion photographer in Margate, a bridal shop in Mayfair, a consultant who lives between London and Paris, a sustainable brand in Oxfordshire, a handbag brand in Wimbledon, or a cashmere brand in Edinburgh, it is unlikely the BFC would be able to support your requests

Sunday, 14 June 2026

What manufacturing needs is trade directories backed by government data.

Every sector of the economy could probably do with this. If you've ever thought of getting something printed, you will have realised the variety of printing techniques alongside binding and different minimum orders, you will probably have found incomplete trade directories and done a bit of googling. The same is true of services as well, if you want to find the right lawyer or plumber. With manufacturing, there are extra problems and it doesn't matter why, although I think I can describe, it just matters that it's true. I know it's true from trying to sell vegan footwear, mainly in the 2000s 2010s, and trying to find suppliers. A frustration is that if you do strike gold; if you discover your perfect supplier, ig quite likely closes because not enough other people have discovered it!

A year or so ago I wrote something for a government consulation and put the text here because slightly public, which makes it more interesting to edit just in case someone reads! It is also harder to loose than files on my hard disc. I will try to edit a little this June '26

This is what I wrote.

I propose greater access to raw data on
employment types,
industrial classifications (from VAT and income tax records), and
export data by product classification and manufacturing origin.

Companies House already provides business classification data, which could be refined and supplemented with additional data sources. The goal is to enable the creation of comprehensive UK trade directories, similar to historical resources like The Shoe Trades Directory to identify which firms manufacture specific products in the UK—from footwear and clothing to solar panels.

It looks as though a government consultation suggested this format.

1. Who looses?
1. Who gains?
3. Why government? How much do Google, AI, or private sector directories like Kompass or Checkatrade do the job already? Why don't suppliers all just get good web sites or join a trade association?

1. Who looses?

Businesses loose privacy, and might not want orders
Some sole traders may prefer confidentiality, but might forget to tick a box on their tax form to request this. They might prefer an anonimous kind of contact form instead of a name and address for contact.
Taxpayers loose other services (unless this brings in more tax, which is a bet)
I think trade directories are a safe bet for raising tax revenue and growing the economy.
But there is a cost to releasing data - mainly in deciding how.
Legal & policy change: Currently, FOI requests for HMRC data are rejected under the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005. However, the Act does allow exceptions where "specified in regulations made by the Treasury" or where "the Commissioners are satisfied that it is in the public interest" (Section 20, UK Legislation). So, ministers and senior people in the treasury have to write regulations or persuade “commissioners”.
Bombing targets in a war: The BAE shell manufacturing plant is already capable of being put underground in Wales, I think.

2. Who gains?

Trade directories benefit...

Buyers & sellers: Businesses searching for niche products (e.g., wiring looms, speaker cones, footwear components) would have a reliable resource. A past example includes a car manufacturer requesting tariff exemptions due to difficulty sourcing specific UK-made components. Also, when a factory isn't visible, it might not be viable. You can find your speaker cone factory or shoe factory, and then it closes because not enough other people are interested.

Jobseekers: Easier access to local employers and industry information. Business owners might spot gaps in the market more clearly as well.
The UK produced non-woven materials for things like weed control fabric, but there was nowhere for buyers to look to find cotton alternatives; there were schemes to try to out- bid other countries and get gowns from China.
.
Economic planners & policymakers:
Economists spot inflationary pressures from something like an oil price rise, have a think, and suggest putting the interest rate up. This closes factories. Really, that's how the system works!
They do talk a little about "the supply side", but tend just to think about wages and a vague "productivity" idea; they don't have information about how to install more solar panels and wind farms to counter-act the oil price rise. I think that if more information were available, at least an economist could point towards an area and say "that's the area of expertise that might help reduce inflation".
The UK produced medical ventilators for very ill people during the COVID crisis with the designs already worked-out and ready to make in bigger quantities, but I remember that this information emerged slowly.National security & trade policy: The UK needs resilient supply chains. If the USA restricts weapons exports or trade tensions with China escalate, policymakers must quickly identify local alternatives.
MPs and regional development agencies
...need to know what is already being made in their areas in order to help if they can or just to consult.
Apprenticeship providers
The Mayor of Manchester boasted that he had got training and demand to match-up better in Manchester so that people could train to do real jobs installing solar panels (if I remember right).
Journalists and bloggers
This is a few points in one.
Journalists report on "a previously unknown private mine" if there is an accident or "possibly the last piano manufacturer" when Yamaha ceased production. A story about one of the last two scissor manufacturers caught-on and kept production viable. With this rather puzzled kind of coverage, it is hard er for buyers to enjoy feeling part of the story.

This happened to me last year. I was buying a car battery on ebay, like you do, and found that Lucas batteries are made in Sri Lanca;. UK ones are made by Yuasa in Ebbow Vale. There was even a £2.5 million grant from the Welsh government, and it could hae got a better return on investment if sypathetic buyers had recnised the brand and thought "that's nice", and felt good, rather than scrolling-on down the list. So I am mixing-up buyer sympathy with journalist and blogger exposure and could probably tease the points out more clearly but hope you get the idea
Startups & innovators: Smaller firms, particularly those competing against low-cost imports, lack the magin and scale for an advertising budget. As the founder of The Kinky Boot Factory noted in a documentary, imported shoes enter the UK at £15, while the rest of the wholesale cost is advertising. UK manufacturers cannot afford such advertising, and a trade directory would level the playing field.
Larger importers who need top-ups trials and remedials done closer to their customers
Surface mail from Asia can take 2-3 and the cheap suppliers like large orders. For clothing, without UK factories, this can lead to -
◦ Rushed Asian orders which can lead to worse working conditions in Asian factories.
◦ Expensive & high-emission air freight. This point made by Addidas who tried publishing their low transport emmisions data for a few years. They gave up. Each year there were a few rushed orders that stopped the data liiking so good.
◦ Clearance pricing on the ranges that are missing some sizes.
Each of these problems can be solved, ideally, with a UK factory willing to do smaller quicker orders while the container loads or the cartons come from Asia.

3. Why government?
How much do Google, AI, or private sector directories like Kompass or Checkatrade do the job already?

The problem is manufactuers, not service providers.

Historical context:
A Shoe Trades Directory from 1998 listed nearly every footwear and footwear component manufacturer in the UK, including batch sizes, pricing tiers, and production methods. This allowed buyers to contact the right suppliers with the right questions and most likely get a reply. It was sponsored by a shoe trade magazine where the advertising sales staff had ato make the list anyway. The internet now provides some of this information for free and footwear trade magazines are long-gone in the UK, but the subtle detail of who makes exactly what in what minimum orders and whether they are mass-market, “top end” or in the middle are hard to find.
Broad hostoricla context: north v south.
Everybody knows that industrial areas have suffered after loss of trade to low-wage countries.
In 1979 a new economic policy managed to control inflation by raising interest rates. Almost by mistake, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy raises exchange rates at the same time and my estimate is that a fifth of manufacturing was lost in five years. Another interest rate spike followed in the mid 80s. (The same exchange rate fluctuations also effect cheap tourism, where the choice between Blackpool and Alicante can depend on the exchange rate.)

The positive way of putting this is that maybe more manufacturing went to cheaper countries than need have done; there could be a chance to get some back if consumers felt good about buying British and buyers were able to find British factories.
Manufacturing is rare and subdivided into more specialities than the people on Checkatrade who can probably concentrate on a few postcodes and do more than one kind of job. Manufacturing depends on a set of machines and the product the machines usually make. I suppose that's why it's rarer to find a manufacturer diretory than a service directory.
Competition from cheap countries that lack a welfare state. You might expect the UK’s only manufacturer of some particular niche product to be good at sifting emails for customer enquiries. The reality for clothing manufacturers, according to the Make it British web site, is that they are more like some of the plumbers and plasterers on Checkatrade, working without a receptionist or a sales rep and just scanning the emails on a smartphone in-between a load of other jobs. They tend not to list their capabilities online, leading to many ignored inquiries from businesses unaware of minimum order requirements or production methods.

Trade directories can help, as they have in the past

I propose the creation of an online database of UK manufacturers, based on HMRC records. Businesses could be listed as either:

“Willing to receive inquiries”, or
“Opted out of direct contact”
" .... " - individuals might want to be ex-directory.

The database should be indexed by:

Manufacturing classification (from VAT/income tax records). Income tax is important as I don't think ministries have information about sole trader businesses that aren't registered for VAT.. We saw this in the way Brexit was negotiated: it's often uneconomic to sort the VAT on a small export to Europe, even if the courier does it. Importing, it's easy to end up ppaying VAT twice.
Export/import declarations.
Workforce size categories (e.g., "1-10 employees").
Companies House classification (improved by prompts on Companies House forms to clarify what "manufacturer" means such as "manufactuer with own workshops in the UK".
Optional business self-submissions, including website links, production details, and minimum order requirements.

Such a publicly accessible resource would encourage the private sector to develop value-added directories, including Kompass that already exists, while improving domestic trade efficiency. It's something people expect to find already.

Conclusion

A UK-wide manufacturing database would enhance transparency, strengthen local supply chains, and reduce unnecessary imports, benefiting businesses, workers, and policymakers alike. The key is to ensure privacy safeguards, minimal taxpayer burden, and a user-friendly format to encourage adoption. Would be happy to discuss further.

Government pays for something it calls "fashion". Odd isn't it?

Government pays for something it calls "fashion" already.

The Department for Business and the Greater London Authority (confusingly called "British Fashion Council" for the purpose) help sellers connect to overseas buyers and have used export credit guarantees a lot according to newspaper reports. The British Fashion Council has a web page promoting them. London taxpayers pay half a million or more a year for British Fashion Council; exhibitors pay a lot to exhibit there and at a couple of feeder shows run by art colleges rather than by manufacturers.

There are a couple of problems with the scheme I think.

Taxpayers can subsidise asian-made proucts, if a UK "designer" comissions them

UK Trade and Investment helped sell Indian pants, for example, under the Pants to Poverty brand, and there are plenty of other products at London Fashion Week from unknown manufacturers, maybe unknown and in the UK usually unknown and in some sweatshop country or autocracy. That was an odd case because the Department for International Development was keen, but generally the taxpayer gets less bang for their buck by by backing exports of asian-made products.

The chances of helping manufacturing areas is low, as the designers are not forced to name their suppliers and UK suppliers are crowded out of media attention by this event promoting designers wherever they get their stuff made.

The people who set this scheme up might have assumed that manufacturing would and could close altogether, but it hasn't and it's needed for startups and niche companies who want things made in the UK, as well as large importers who want trials and top-ups or remedial work. This industry is really useful, and as a bang-for-buck taxpayer I want to promote it because it spreads money around in the UK economy.

Export credit schemes might have been abused

I saw goods priced much higher than usual at London Fashion Week — maybe double. I also saw a newspaper report that they are often sold to the taxpayer in effect, because export credit guarantees given and used for bad debts. Now: imagine you're noughtly. We could dream-up a scheme together couldn't we?

Supply chain resilience is now a thing.

I have not read the policy, but I know that supply of cotton medical gowns was a huge problem during the COVID emergency, while non-woven materials are still made in the UK. "Our problem is that it comes off the machine at so many metres a second," someone told me about an ex-ICI factory making weed-control fabric in Wales. I do not know if this works for medical gowns, but I am sure that nobody checked before setting up supply chains from China in ways that did not work.

National Procurement Policy is a thing.

I have not read the policy. But ministers have spoken and shown interest. How can every tax-funded agency be persuaded to procure in a better way? Buyers are presumably much like the rest of us, used to working in a service economy where plenty of suppliers exist, like applicants for jobs, responding to an advert. But the suppliers and the adverts are not geared to UK manufacturing, and cannot be, because nobody really knows where it is or what it can make.
Representative organisations are a problem mentioned in a post below. In the past, fashion was treated as a creative industry, so publicly funded creative-industry organisations were assumed to “represent” it, particularly on training needs, but they could not get much feedback from manufacturers. Private trade associations exist, such as the British Footwear Association or the Fashion and Textiles Round Table, but small manufacturers don't all have the cash to join, even if they have the time and it's their kind of thing.

How do you “represent” a diffuse supply chain of firms that are quite different from service industries?

Rare; it is hard to find the last firms that can still do x, y, or z.
Able to spread money into unusual areas.
Very lean, often without an advertising budget or sales representatives, so they suffer when consumers buy advertised brands.
Easily closed down when exchange rates move sharply, as in the 1980s.
Hard to re-establish once machines and skills have gone.
Historically reliant on home-market interest, but this now seems old-fashioned and hard to renew.

On the other hand, a government answer to an MP was that they do not want to “tell people what to buy”. So the question becomes: how do you promote interest in UK-made goods without patronising consumers?

Tuesday, 9 June 2026

Industrial Strategy: does it give UK suppliers a chance to sell to government?

A quick scan of Government statements suggests a slow change of procurement systems, they hope, to allow British products a chance. It came up in a debate about the Industrial Strategy (which I have not read) just recently.

I wrote the next few paragraphs without realising there's a change in procurement law that I ought to check-out, but the old freedom of information response below still gives an idea of the problem.

Years ago in 2019 I wrote a blog post now lost about Merseyside Police procurement of Firebikes – a kind of boys' dream of motorbike & fire extinguisher. I counted the number of UK motorbike manufacturers on Wikipedia and I hoped to find some statement about whether Merseyside Police gave these smaller enthusiast firms a chance before buying BMW. The answer looked like a "no", combined with a certification process and a need to apply. The motorcycle workshop that works in some other niche market has to know that the

tender exists and roughly how long it takes to apply
they are in with a chance (maybe someone like them got a contract before or BMW are expensive compared to their pricing)
certification is possible; maybe a tender can be granted subject to certification to reduce application costs

and all of these are possible but, if you are running a workshop along with tax and employment and the rest, would you think it plausible enough to spend time?

There are similar things about footwear, the trade I worked in. A process defines how you certify a safety boot, but the people doing the certification are expensive. Government could help by encouraging more people to go into the certification business and emphasising how simple some of the tests are. Government could even help with the cost. If you are applying to supply ceremonial footwear, the process is murky and nobody really knows how a certain firm gets the contract. If you want to supply air crew footwear – that had just changed when I looked.

This is the reply to the freedom of information request:

Firexpress: The bikes complete with Firexpress system and personal protective equipment were purchased from the sole UK distributor for Firexpress, Depot Rail. We do not get a choice of the motorbike that Depot Rail have had certified for use.

Motorcycles (General use). These are purchased through the PITO Framework (Police Information Technology Organisation) which is a national framework for the purchase of cars, vans and motorcycles, and is available for Police and Fire Authorities to utilize and has followed the appropriate procurement process for the establishment of the Framework. Our Contract Standing Orders are published and are in the public domain.

I didn't dig deeper.

Now, some civil servant might be given the job as the current government is interested in using procurement more creatively. By chance it's my local MP who popped the question about Industrial Strategy. I will pop her question here at some point but meanwhile she got this reply

"there is a commitment among Ministers to ensure that Government procurement is targeted at British companies. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made a strong commitment to reduce regulation and bureaucracy, so we can ensure that these contracts are awarded more efficiently and more easily to small businesses in the UK"

Nobody stated which civil servant is given the job of reviewing The Police Information Technology Network's framework for procuring bikes, or uniforms, or anything else, or how to get positive suggestions into their in-tray and some of the catch phrases are from the USA. My MP, asking the question, said "nobody ever got the sack for specifying IBM". Another catch phrase: "Will the last person out of Chicago please turn out the lights?", followed by attempts by the remaining institutions like colleges, hospitals and local government to hire local people and use local production.

From my own experience in working with agencies commissioned by local government trying to re-generate and support local employment, the attempts are often wildly botched and entirely the wrong people are hired to do a terrible job (I was in finge social work and the contractors were firms like NACRO or housing associations) but the idea is good even if past experience is mixed.

After writing the text above, I realise that there have been changes in procurement law and guidance since 2023 which I know very little about. The guidance is called the National Procurement Policy Statement and I don't know if it is also law. An introduction says

"This new NPPS ensures that public money spent on public procurement supports delivery of the Government’s missions, delivers economic growth, supports small businesses, champions innovation, and creates good jobs and opportunities across the country"

Monday, 8 June 2026

the UK fashion and textiles industry - something just isn't clicking. What is it?

Why is the UK fashion industry so fragmented and under-supported—and what structure or system would actually make it coherent, represented, and properly funded? (that's an AI one line summery of these notes in progress from someone who runs Fashion Roundtable and wrote some notes in progress below. I'll comment in my next post)

Wednesday, 9 March 2022

~~https://www.stop-russian-propaganda.com/~~ used to be a web site about over-loading Russian propaganda websites with requests from browsers, as well as harder sites to crack like MIL.RU and commercial sites.

It's good to have revived an old blog and published a page with that link just in case it helped.

Sites like stop-russian-propaganda probably made a very slight difference, specially to enemy web sites that weren't used to defending themselves with the likes of Cloudflare. There was probably a morale-reducing or morale-boosting effect to either side. Imagine if you work in IT and are asked to help defend a Russian web site against individual activists from all over the world. Wouldn't you think that it's time to emigrate?

https://www.uahelp.me/help/ is where I found the stop russian propaganda link with various ways that people can help - mainly adding money to what taxpayers in the UK have already contributed.

Another idea: tanks and military hardwire.

I don't understand why donor countries like the UK want to donate lots of reserves of equipment, but not the whole lot. The idea seems to be to keep essentials like recently-made tanks, but donate what we can spare like the previous model. I don't get this idea. What are the tanks for if not to stop Russia and China invading? Russia is already invading power lines on sea beds; it is already invading with assassins to kill people in Salisbury. Russia funds daft politicians, if I understand right, in order to make democracy fail. Russia and China will not stop at some treaty line like the Minsk agreement that said they would stop after Crimea. If they win, and win, and win, it is only a matter of time before they annexe the UK or countries so close that we have to be close to the buffer zone and ignore what they do while moving closer and closer. Finlandization used to be the jargon word.

I don't understand the argument the other way. Maybe I have missed it. Why would we not donate every single tank to Ukraine (or whatever other piece of hardware)? You cannot do much else with most of this hardware. You cannot hoover the carpet with it, or generate electricity for a town, or

Monday, 7 March 2022

Uahelp.me/help/

A balding man with a laptop gets grandiose when given power, whether it is a power to write this little-read blog, or a power to command conscripts to kill. The balding little man in Moscow looks pretty unwell, mentally and physically, which is bad for the careerists who endure him face to face and try to carry out his orders.

Uahelp.me/help/ looks a good link for ways of trying to help people in Ukraine. One of them is free to do, but I have not worked out how to do it. Maybe there is some online service for checking whether some Russian sites like banks and Gasprom and Kremlin.ru are still down due to other people checking. I have not worked out how to use the more intense software suggested, but somebody reading this might get it going straight away. As it's likely that the Kremlin will find a way of closing down the internet in Ukraine. I guess that any outside help is welcome.

Monday, 9 August 2021

Free trade has made Vietnam factory workers poorer when not linked to national insurance

This post will change a bit as I get the facts together but here's a start
https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/wages-in-manufacturing
says that wages in Vietnamese manufacturing have not much risen recently; the bar chart shows a big peak and then a fall.
https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/wages-in-manufacturing says that people in Vietnam have benefited from a recent free trade deal with the UK. The link is to a consulation document which states this as a fact. The same consultation process leaves-out any questions on wny the UK is paying other countries to under-cut UK manufacturers; consultations on each deal, such as the recent mexico deal consultation, are silent on the subject and give no clue that a subsidy to the other side might exist.

It turns-out that I'm wrong: Vietnam has a firtility rate of about two, and some kind of national insurance and welfare state. I don't know if it's a good one, but it's enough to stop the firtility rate going as high Mexico (where the UK wants to pay to get a trade deal!) or Nigeria, where women have about four children and I expect that women in poor families have more, boosting the unemployment queue and lowering wages however many cut-rate products westerners buy from there. Also, I forget where I got the firtility rate figures, but welfare / national insurance information is here -
https://ww1.issa.int/country-profiles

Sunday, 8 August 2021

Low cost of reducing evil: Afghanistan Iran and Pakistan

I was going to write a review of the sneakers exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

Instead:

Afghanistan and the rounding-up of wives

Wikipedia says that the Afghan Army payroll has varied over decades and is quite low at the moment, for a country that is always at war. AFN 717,857 or GBP 6,600 is an average salary, a bit below average salaries overall in the country but with a pay-rise promised out of despiration.

To fund an Afghan soldier you need to work well and hard or have £6,600 x 10 invested at 10%: £66,000 or half the cost of the cheapest house in the UK. If you have the cheapest house in the UK, and no costs or debt and somewheere else to live, you have the money to fund two Afghan soldiers if you can invest at 10%. Ask me how. You need an expert intemediary or to trust whatever the Afghan embassy suggests.

There might be someone who could add noughts on the end of that figure and is looking for something to do with their money, other than funding political parties of sponsoring the Olympics. Suppose that politicians in the UK declared a halt on all party funding, and urged donors to fund other causes instead, that might release one who could fund a lot of Afghan soldiers. If the situation is too dire in the non-taliban parts of Afghanistan for many soldiers to be recruited or trained and show value for money, there may be a way of paying for help from over the border if the Pakistani government is forced to allow. I crossed those paragraphs out as US and European taxpayers already pay a bit towards the Afghan army, according to an Al Jazerrah article on my phone today

There is another problem. People in Pakistan and Iran are doing exactly the same thing, individually and via their governments I suppose. There is no way to hold Taliban prisoners in a more stable country like Pakistan, so there's a risk of their prisons being in areas where they are released and allowed to kill more people and round-up more wives. Countries like Pakistan Iran are run for monotheists who has no respect for other opinions and minorities; it's obvious that a proportion of people there will go further, and be the crusaders or the violent puritans or just fund such people from beige living rooms while watching MTV

if the UK's new tariff system fined countries where this happens, such as Iran and Pakistan, the problem would be made more obvious and there would be bit of tax revenue coming-in from tariffs. It might even fund something good in whatever country
https://www.gov.uk/search/policy-papers-and-consultations often has pages where you can put a reasonable point of view on record, maybe informed by facts, and demonstrate how little I have done the same. I thought there was one on the general direction of UK trade deals for example, but can't even find it, for all my talk of funding Afghan soliders.

Update: people who are better-informed than me in Afghanistan do this:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/11/sanction-pakistan-twitter-trend-afghanistan-taliban Meanwhile the UK
https://www.gov.uk/search/policy-papers-and-consultations?keywords=trade&content_store_document_type%5B%5D=open_consultations&order=relevance
...shows open consultations on trade, and with a bit of a search I see that there's an open consultation for India and for "developing" countries. It think there has also been a UK government trade sanction on Belarus, but no mention of it on the trade pages. Sanctions and trade deals are worked-out in different offices, and in different parts of the brains of the people who make these decisions in government. UK government trade pages write about deals with Myanmar and probably even Belorus as though sanctions didn't exist

A better scheme would mix the two. Sanctions on Myanmar have not much effect, I think, because the regime there is past caring. Sanctions on Pakistan would have an effect because civil society, the economy, and the thing goverment says when it is trying to sound western, all might influence decisons there.

One such sanction could be a low extra tariff on countries that promote monotheism in schools. The UK might have to sanction itself, but it's still a good idea. That way of thinking can justify anything; the reward is in heavan. In someone on the borderline of violence, it is an added factor, like heroin use and a peer pressure, which can over-ride concience. In the Pakistan religious acadamies, boys might have all three. According to Al Jazeera -
"The Taliban militia emerged as a substantial player in 1994. Many of its members had studied in conservative religious schools in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan."

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

Ethical credentials for free, scraped-together from the country where a product is made

Exampes

The pages are set-up already by my shopping cart software which expects them to be used for brands or manufacturers, but I don't have much for sale with a known brand name on it, so the pages were going spare. Under each list of scores I write

"more than a vegan shoe brand, but these costs reduce what's left for brand advertising, PR & packaging for smart retail, rapid style changes and air freight, new moulds, or fiddly sewing. You can draw your own brand, like a smiley face or a black spot or something if you want."

This is a great relief to someone who is used to getting ethical credentials for free just by writing "vegan" on a product on a home made web site, next to "wash at 40 degrees" or "postage three pounds". Other producers have always had a tougher job trying to justify one factory in Bangladesh as being a better employer than another factory in Sri Lanka. If we know where a product was made we can compare free information about each country, just so long as someone has done the work already and put some kind of number on it. Not that there is a number for human rights in China because that country is off the bottom of the scale, but most countries have a number.

For a long time, I didn't know that a human rights index existed and I think it's quite new. Mary Creagh mentioned it on a video of the Environmental Audit Committee that I sat-through, and I immediately stole the idea. Another came soon after on a Make it British virtual trade show where Mr Nieper of David Nieper Ltd gave a video speech about his company's carbon emissions, as reported by Nottingham University who realised that electriciy units take more CO2 to make in China than in the UK. The UK v China CO2 emmission report is buried on the David Niaper Ltd web site, but after some googling I found the International Energy Agency. It shows each country scored on a few boxes. The ratio of electriciy output to CO2 produced making electricity is a simple number, in some unit or other.

SSA.gov in the USA was a previous google discovery. It publishes a concise guide to the social security system, if any, in each country and adds a list of government spending on headings like health and education. The guide seems to come from the International Social Security Association, who have a permanant link for each country but a much slower web site and a series of drop-downs for each one that makes it impossible to glance at; you have to know what you're looking for before you can find it. So I have stuck to SSA.gov and their information pages called a "world factbook", published by the CIA.

Monday, 23 March 2020

UK government forms for medical and emergency procurement

The UK government has no database of UK manufacturers.

They have two forms to show interest in providing medical or emergency goods and services.

The first is general including personal protective equipment like face masks
The second is for ventilators. I guess that manufacturing quickly in the UK is what they're most interested in; there is a "where" box next to each item on the second form.

Goods and Services Assistance: COVID-19 - smartsurvey.co.uk/s/l5b32s or

bit.ly/covidhelpuk

GOODS

Food
Hotel Rooms for any use
Hotel Rooms for lodging
Manufacturing equipment
Medical Equipment -
PPE Medical Equipment -
Testing equipment Medical Equipment -
Other Office space for any use
Warehouse/Industrial space
Other (please provide a description of these goods):

SERVICES

Community Support
Consultancy for Medical Equipment
Design Consultancy - other
Construction expertise
Engineering expertise
IT services expertise
Manufacturing expertise
Medical expertise
Project management / procurement expertise
Social Care
Transport - logistics or courier
Transport - people
Other (please provide a description of these services)

VENTILATOR PARTS

https://ventilator.herokuapp.com/ - form; https://engineersassemble.tribe.so/ - end-product spec.

GOODS

Do you already produce regulated ventilators that are used in a UK clinical setting i.e. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), approved with a CE mark?
Have you made parts or systems for ventilators:
for human use in clinical setting? Yes No
for use in veterinary setting? Yes No
use in any other setting? Yes No If you answered yes to any of the above, please provide further details. Please indicate whether you design, manufacture or supply any of the following medical devices or component parts and, if so, where.

Category: Design / Manufacture / Supply / Location

Air Compressors / Pumps
Bellows
Self-inflating bags
Gas mixing valves
Pressure Regulators
Flow Control valves
Solenoid valves
Pressure relief valves
Check valves / one-way valves
Industrial Automation components (Safety Relays, PLCs)
Power Supplies
Electric Motors, and motor controllers
Linear actuators and controllers
Tubing and fittings
Pressure Sensors and Indicators
Oxygen Sensors and Indicators
Flow Sensors and Indicators
Manometers
Heat and moisture exchanging filters (HMEFs)
Air Filter, HEPA Filters

SERVICES

6. Please indicate in

which of the following activities your organisation has relevant skills,
which is your specialism, and
where these activities take place.

Category: Relevant skills / Specialism / Location

Design / specification
Rapid prototyping
Manufacturing (manual)
Manufacturing (automated)
Machine Shops/sheet metal/tool manufacture
Pneumatic part manufacturers/suppliers
Contract/Product Assembly
Certification/regulation/testing
Logistics
Medical Training

7. Please indicate which enabling resources are you able to provide in service of this initiative.

Suitable space
Equipment
Trained personnel
Other

theengineer.co.uk/uk-government-manufacturers-ventilators-nhs/ - posts in The Engineer independent.co.uk/news/business/coronavirus-ventilators-uk-new-dyson-order-government-shortage-nhs-a9426561.html - post in The Independent mention a GTech contract and that GTech will make the plans open source. Headlines seem to go to party donor Dyson instead.
gtech.co.uk/ventilators
This one from a college doesn't mention a manufacturer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IMaYFNB9tA&feature=emb_rel_end There is also an open source design project in Ireland which I don't understand - it's about slack channels and github for those qualified to help.

https://www.ventilatorchallengeuk.com/
has been promised orders

Party donor James Dyson has been promised orders, with no web page findable yet
https://hexus.net/ce/news/general/141073-everything-know-dyson-covent-ventilator/

Wednesday, 29 July 2026

VAT fracture was my experience of Brexit. It's in the open letter for exports.

Oxford Economics and the £35 billion figure that fashion "contributes"

London Fashion Week trying to "put London on the map"

Sunday, 14 June 2026

What manufacturing needs is trade directories backed by government data.

I propose greater access to raw data onemployment types, industrial classifications (from VAT and income tax records), and export data by product classification and manufacturing origin.

Friday, 12 June 2026

Government pays for something it calls "fashion" already.

Supply chain resilience is now a thing.

National Procurement Policy is a thing.

How do you “represent” a diffuse supply chain of firms that are quite different from service industries?

Tuesday, 9 June 2026

Monday, 8 June 2026

Wednesday, 9 March 2022

Monday, 7 March 2022

Monday, 9 August 2021

Sunday, 8 August 2021

Afghanistan and the rounding-up of wives

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

Monday, 23 March 2020

Goods and Services Assistance: COVID-19 - smartsurvey.co.uk/s/l5b32s or

GOODS

SERVICES

GOODS

SERVICES

Thursday, 20 February 2020

Section 2 : Tariff Rates

Section 3 : UK Global Tariff Principles

I propose greater access to raw data on
employment types,
industrial classifications (from VAT and income tax records), and
export data by product classification and manufacturing origin.