A letter to the Editor of the Times which was published on 30th December 2011.

With economic forecasting having rather less predictive power than tips for the 3.30 at Newmarket, one must admire the confidence with which the Centre for Economics and Business Research makes its selections for the league table of major economies in 2020, eight years away (report, Dec. 26th).  Russia and India are advanced to 4th and 5th places in the world, which would require an average annual rate of growth of almost 12 per cent, a figure not achieved even by China during a period – now ending – when the West has displayed an almost inexhaustible appetite for its goods.

Brazil is shown as overtaking Britain for 2011 although the GDP figures for Britain are not in, and official figures for Brazil are usually two to three years in arrears, even if one could rely on their being collected on the same basis to three significant figures as displayed in the Centre’s league table.

Perhaps the CEBR should try horse racing.

This is a substantial paper by Prof Stephen Bush on increasing UK manufacturing by 50%.

It was written on 2nd February 2010 for the UKIP policy group on “Jobs, Enterprise and the Economy” for the parliamentary election campaign.

To read the text of a summary or the pdf of the whole paper, please click on the link “Produce and Prosper” which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 16th May 2003.

Lord Simon of Highbury’s advocacy of Britain abolishing the pound on the grounds that it will assist inward investment in competition with euroland (report, May 14th) sits oddly with the record of his own term as chairman of BP when the vast bulk of its investment went into North America and the Far East, especially China, as it continues to do.

Likewise, claims by Sir Nick Scheele of Ford and others (Business, May 13th) that abolishing the pound will introduce vitally needed “stability” hardly squares with his company’s sourcing its engines for European markets from its factories in Brazil, a country whose currency has changed its value against the dollar by about 70 per cent in seven years and changed its name three times in the past 10.

Rick Waggoner, chairman of General Motors, who has just announced £80 million of actual, not theoretical investment, for Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant, is surely right when he commented that the real issue is not the pound/euro exchange rate, but labour competitiveness.

This was borne out last week when a local engineering factory closed with the loss of 270 jobs, basically due to the fact that the competitive Chinese factory pays £15 a week compared with £330 a week here – a difference of 22 times.

This massive difference is engaging the attention of just about every manufacturing company in the land.  Compared with this, the few per cent variations in the pound/euro exchange rate are a total irrelevance.