In a recent post, I mentioned how I think most people think of manufacturing in a rather old way: oily blokes of little education bashing at pieces of metal in production lines, or women sitting in banks of sewing machines. But that most manufacturing is smaller scale, more specialised.
I think another thing like this is what people think our exports look like. Let's just take food. We have countless stories in the press of the effect of Brexit on our food industry: lamb farmers, beef farmers, cheese producers. And on the flip side, the benefits of Brexit for fishing. Not many stories about the Scotch Whisky industry, though, are there? What's the effect of Brexit on Scotch Whisky?
You'd think this would be worth reporting on, because Scotch Whisky is a larger export market than fish, meat and dairy combined. We exported £5.6bn of Scotch Whisky last year, compared to around £1.9bn of fish, £1.8bn of beef and £1.8bn of dairy and eggs (total £5.5bn).
See, I think at one time these things mattered. Raw exports were a big deal. We probably didn't export much in the 70s but bits of machinery and raw food. You didn't have ARM exporting chip designs or Chris Tarrant exporting game show formats to India. Most Indians didn't have TVs.
But there's where the growth is. Partly because microchips are higher value goods, but also because economic growth is faster outside the EU and goods like meat and cheese are more expensive to export far. They're large and often perishable. And what's growing is the less perishable stuff with more value added and/or branding.