The hugely expensive deep specialisms, and really unusual steels and steel products that were made in just three or four places in the world, one of them Sheffield, need not. cough Iraqi supergun -- though Sheffield Forgemasters are actually one of the few still around, thanks to govt underwriting due to their nuclear capability. Funny that. Nor need the manufacturing of some of the world's finest precision tool and instrument makers. A tiny few survive, despite government best effort, not because. Most were eagerly snapped up by US, German, French or Japanese -- if they still exist at all, it's as name made elsewhere and a fattening of someone's portfolio. Of course many disappeared without trace, and of course a fair selection that weren't worth saving having got fat and lazy, or overly unionised.

While morons were cropping up on UK news throughout the eighties and nineties trying to persuade us that making anything was obsolete (and so frequently that it quickly got as overused, tedious and cliched as the recent Theresa May election slogan "strong and stable government"), Germany quietly got on with new services and manufacturing. Their mittelstand(sp?) and technical training regularly cropping up as something for the rest of Europe to envy. UK disassembled the last of the technical colleges, apprenticeships, and all the regional centres of knowledge and excellence. No matter how keen you're unlikely to pick manufacturing for your new UK business, as we are exceptional in the extent of our disassembly of the sector.

How did Sheffield's future as a centre of telephone call centres work out? Or Central Belt's reinvention as world centre of electronic and IT manufacture? How did the focus on the City work, when right after the "big bang" Wall Street went on a shopping spree of stupendous size leaving few native survivors?