# Buy British: it will help defend the UK against Trump

Iverson: Invest in Britain. You might make a fortune. Take a punt on a fintech company or an artificial intelligence startup. Better still, join the rest of the world by targeting property, which is the go-to asset class for  seeking a stellar payout.

Whatever you do, avoid retail. And steer clear of manufacturing, which needs lots of startup capital and precision engineering, and offers only slim margins and modest returns as a reward for all that effort.

## Manufacturing is back in the spotlight

In the frontline of British manufacturing are many globally competitive businesses, from fighter jet maker BAE Systems and warship builder Babcock International to the security group QinetiQ. Alongside them are French, German and Italian counterparts, including the Rome-headquartered Leonardo, which owns the former Westland helicopter factory in Yeovil, Somerset.

Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics top the list of US defence firms. Both make the Ajax “mini tank” – considered a central pillar of the British army’s operations – while Lockheed also supplies Britain with the F-35 fighter jet.

The F-35, used by the RAF and navy, operates alongside Eurofighter Typhoon jets, some of which, specifically the T1 model, are showing their age and are to be scrapped for spares.

Defence secretary John Healey must soon decide whether to upgrade these to the newer version of the Typhoon, the T5, as other partner nations in the Eurofighter consortium – Germany, Italy and Spain – have done, or make a trip to Lockheed’s offices to buy more F-35s. It is  that should be made in the Typhoon’s favour.

The general rule of thumb, according to defence expert Trevor Taylor of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) thinktank, should be: does the British or European kit deter the Russians, and if it does, then is the UK/EU version good enough to buy?

There are about 12,000 other firms in the defence supply chain, many of them family owned and run, with histories going back to the second world war and beyond. After 40 years of shrinking defence budgets, they have often expanded away from defence to other related areas and may be only considered defence contractors in the broadest sense.

Encouraging them to become involved again in the defence supply chain is not going to be easy when they remember the kind of contractual game-playing and ministerial dither and delay that only the biggest companies can cope with.

Smaller firms are often also trapped in a loveless marriage with their local communities, who do not want to live next to a factory or work in it, while lauding its existence.

Manufacturing may not be seen as the dirty, life-shortening job it once was, but as a career it is often considered a dead end. Meanwhile, factory owners have typically done a terrible job selling the benefits of a life making tangible objects. A succession of Tory government initiatives hasn’t helped – in particular the apprenticeship levy, which triggered a dramatic fall in the number of young people starting training programmes from its inception in 2017.

Engineering students are just as likely to veer off their chosen path into the world of finance as they are to build a bridge or develop a defence project. No wonder few investors want to touch UK manufacturing, let alone defence contracting.

It means Labour needs lots of jigsaw pieces to fit together before it can begin to think about a deterrent that relies less on the US and more with our European partners. But redirecting foreign and domestic capital to it would be a start.
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