Buy British?

[RoofTops]

Does anyone remember the time when buying a British TV was accompanied by an 'engineer' to set it up to work properly.

Not quite the same thing but we've just bought a new Panasonic TV and it came with TWO men from the local shop to set it up. The menu choices were bewildering but at least it now speaks to Mr Murdoch's Sky Box (via my mobile 'phone I think) and our state-of-the-art-10-years-ago DVD player.

 

[Hombre]

Yes, quite a different scenario and perhaps a sign of our advanced times.

Incredible to think that scientists only fully understood how the honey bee flew as recently as 2003. In the Jurgen Tautz book I believe.

 

[greatbritishhoney]

For me it is not just the fact that we are supporting british manufacturing and jobs etc by buying british, it is also the fact that many parts of the world use virtual slave labour to bring us the "cheap" products that we think are such good value. When you pick up a bargain pair of trousers at Tesco or ASDA you don't see the Bangladeshi seamstress earning what is considered to be less than a living wage (with no holidays, no employment rights etc).

The problem is that it is so hard to buy ethically these days because the manufacturing processes are out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

 

[Firefly]

For me it is not just the fact that we are supporting british manufacturing and jobs etc by buying british, it is also the fact that many parts of the world use virtual slave labour to bring us the "cheap" products that we think are such good value. When you pick up a bargain pair of trousers at Tesco or ASDA you don't see the Bangladeshi seamstress earning what is considered to be less than a living wage (with no holidays, no employment rights etc).

The problem is that it is so hard to buy ethically these days because the manufacturing processes are out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

I do agree, but it's a very hard issue.

The alternatives for that seamstress if you do not buy her trousers could be starvation of prostitution. She could be working for an employer who sells to a local dealer who sells to a regional dealer who sells to a middle-man who tells Tesco that all his suppliers work in excellent conditions, and takes the Tesco man to see some examples.

If the original tailor pays too much, a less scrupulous competitor starts up next door an under-cuts them. The dealership chain is cut-throat and may be over-laid by a service-charge/graft/bribery (delete as you prefer) system that leaves no room for sentiment

No-one is blameless but no-one is wholly responsible either - including you, me and Tesco. And I'm genuinely not sure what is best. If we all buy Indian trousers, there will be a big enough market to enable workers to choose their employer and things will gradually improve. We are only 4 or 5 generations from when the same evolution happened here. If only those with no conscience buy Indian trousers - with price the only criterion - there is less impetus to change

Dunno

 

[greatbritishhoney]

Dunno

Me neither.
This is the whole problem with a global supply chain - the 'truth' is practically impossible to ascertain, and the data can be interpreted in so many different ways.
Wages for a trained seamstress in Dhaka are around £17 per month (for a 60-90 hour week). Tesco's own figures say that a living wage for that area should be around £22 per month.
But I agree with your points about poor wages being better than the alternative in many countries. The reason it makes me so mad is that the likes of Tesco have the money and the market power to do something about it. The agents and the producers will dance to Tesco's tune, but unfortunately we have all got so used to cheap supermarket clothing that the supermarkets would be very unlikely to raise the price to the consumer to pay for better working conditions abroad.

 

[rae]

This is pretty self excluding for Chinese products (which are currently rubbish)" is a broad sweeping generalisation that largely wrong - certainly there is some dross that comes out of China, but particularly in the field of electronics built under quality control from multinationals, the quality is top notch - (just search for the "Made in PRC" label on a laptop or camera).

Sure, take the output of the average Chinese factory and put it through proper quality control and you'll get some good products. You'll get a very big pile of rejects too which they don't tell you about.

Chinese Manufacturing + Quality Control = good product, same price as anything else
Chinese Manufacturing + no QC = crap product, cheap.

This will change, just as it did for the Japanese.

 

[Der Alte Fritz]

True, but I suspect a lot of the problem is the retail chain - that is, everything between assembly and the final customer including the manufacturer's marketing.

Yes you can blame the retail supply chain for many things but then you have to ask who allowed 4 Supermarket chains to dominate 68% of the food sales in the UK and the death of High Streets and independent shops which gave rise to this situation?

National and local government planning departments have a big hand in this, in setting planning regimes to promote out of town shopping and in setting high taxes.

But then again, government is only responding to popular demand - we love our Sunday shopping, we want to go to mega stores to buy our electrical goods and we want good social services and free health care.

So taxation and costs are high because we want to spend the money on a good standard of living. Go to Hong Kong and the PRC free enterprise zones and taxes are not so high for business but then they do not have free health care and social services are poorer.

I work in an industry that pays 20% VAT while the rest of the world pays 5% VAT, so my prices are higher compared even with Europe. OK but my taxes help fund the NHS.

Rip off Britain - is how it is because we want a high standard of living.

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

Must admit to be very surprised at the results to date. 20% always buying British I can understand, but a further 47% claim to use it as their principle criteria, over price, strikes me as being very odd.

Perhaps I just worded the question badly, otherwise beeks are clearly not as frugal as I always assumed.

 

[Nic Rhodes]

The DIY'er who makes a Queen excluder for 10p will always be the frugal ones who comes here ans write about it, however behind the scenes will be the masses who are more than happy to buy the 'full' commercial product for many other but also good reasons. These must have within that group a pile who want to buy British. The forum in this res[ect will give a very biassed view of what is happening on the ground. In fact at our last beekeeping meeting comments were passed on quite how much new equipment beginners were buying, as opposed to back in the 70s, many of us built our own and the local agri colleges actually taught this to beekeepers.

 

[citizenbee]

My first post!
I like to support local businesses first so try and buy Irish when I can
then my preference is to buy from my British cousins
-no politics in beekeeping!

( Its all peace, love and joy tonight - rain and stormy outside
we are sitting in front of a good British Charnwood Country stove, full of logs and cranked up....
I'm sipping a 'sample' of my first batch of mead
boy oh boys ....this stuff is nice )

 

[tonybloke]

My first post!
I like to support local businesses first so try and buy Irish when I can
then my preference is to buy from my British cousins
-no politics in beekeeping!

( Its all peace, love and joy tonight - rain and stormy outside
we are sitting in front of a good British Charnwood Country stove, full of logs and cranked up....
I'm sipping a 'sample' of my first batch of mead
boy oh boys ....this stuff is nice )

welcome to the forum!

 

[Skyhook]

( Its all peace, love and joy tonight - rain and stormy outside
we are sitting in front of a good British Charnwood Country stove, full of logs and cranked up....
I'm sipping a 'sample' of my first batch of mead
boy oh boys ....this stuff is nice )

Winter's not all bad! Welcome to the forum.