There used to be a song called Selling England By The Pound<\/a>. I think, although obviously I’m too young to know, that inter alia it was about devaluation, the scheme Harold Wilson came up with in the 1960s, artificially lowering the foreign exchange value of sterling to make exports cheaper in the countries they were supposed to be exported to. Since the great days of selling cheap Birmingham crap to natives in Africa, <\/a>British overseas trade had depended on being cheap, the cheaper the better.<\/p>\n I don’t know whether it was because it was difficult to get investment money for new equipment, or the fact that if you mechanise first you’re stuck with the oldest machinery while everyone else is buying the newer stuff, a sense that if it’s not bust don’t fix it or as a country we’ve never, in my experience, valued real skills.<\/p>\n Sure, we had a couple of films about the man who invented the Spitfire. Anyone remember his name? Or his colostomy bag? The man who invented radar then? Or the hovercraft? Henry Hudson, the railway king? Any general other then Butcher Haig, or RAF officer other than Bomber Harris, or any naval officer after Nelson, really? \u00a0Dyson. We know him. He moved his factory from Betjeman’s Malmesbury to China. Because it was cheaper, obviously.<\/p>\n I knew a girl once whose great grandfather was a railway engineer. He designed steam engines, some of his in their time quite literally the fastest things on earth. I had another friend whose grandfather had driven the same engines. They never met. The first one, with her double-barrelled name and her genuine Hon. title put me right when I talked about the nobility of doing real jobs, of being covered in coal dust and sweat, understanding and cajoling these pulsing machines.<\/p>\n “No, he despised people like that,” she told me. Designing these things was a huge mental challenge. Rarely<\/em> hard work. Just don’t ask him to bother about the grimy proles who had to work the things.<\/p>\n And then we had a war that got millions of grimy proles so fed-up with being asked to die for something they weren’t a part of that they voted Churchill, the nation’s saviour, into oblivion. Then we had Peter Sellers playing the archetypal trades unionist Fred Kite,<\/p>\nRiding the rails<\/h3>\n