At an LBS MLab conference on Friday, I found this statement from business author Stuart Crainer staggering: "More people in the UK now work in the Indian food business than in coalmining, shipbuilding and steel-making combined".
One hundred years ago, when my grandfather was leaving school, almost 10% of employment was in the coal industry alone. And probably nobody in the UK worked in the Indian food industry. Even 30 years ago, when Mrs Thatcher came to power, there were probably half a million people working in those 3 industries. (The membership of the NUM, for instance, was then around 200,000.)
Is this a statement of tragic decline or a testament to the economy's ability to change. It makes you wonder which industries, that may hardly exist today, will be the big employers in 30 years or 100 years time?
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