Engineers in the UK (and China)

In a post in February I lamented the status of professional engineers in Britain, and the misuse of the term “engineer”. I didn’t hold out any prospect of significant change then, and the situation was hardly helped last week on the BBC1 reality show, The Apprentice.   Lord Sugar (enobled, and rivalled for charm, by Gordon Brown) chairs a “Board” and selects an aspiring young business person for (in this series) investment and partnership – tasks are set and each week one of the wannabes is stood down. On the 15 June show Sugar decided to ‘fire’ senior design engineer Glenn Ward from the competition because he was an engineer. According to the New Civil Engineer, Sugar told Ward:

“I have never yet come across an engineer that can turn his hand to business. I’m not convinced that a leopard is ever going to change his spots, and [that] an engineer is going to have the right ideas to come in business with me.
He later said that Ward was “exactly the example” of an engineer who fails at business.

This produced a predictable chorus of complaint, for example in the Observer from James Dyson, the inventor and vacuum cleaner tycoon. He was kind enough not to bring up Sugar’s famous prediction in February 2005: 'Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput,'.   In fact it was well before then that Sugar seemed to have lost the nous for consumer electronics he had shown in the 1980s.

While not intentionally trying to make amends, the BBC is providing a much less half-baked view of the role of engineers in Made in Britain, a three-part series presented by Evan Davies . Unfortunately this is on BBC2 and will get a much smaller audience than The Apprentice on BBC1. In the first episode on 20 June Davies visited China, including Shanghai, to look at high-volume, low-value manufacturing of the type no longer viable in the UK. That morning, The Times (£), under the headline, Children get maths lessons from Asian ‘Tigers’, reported that maths teaching in English schools would adopt practices from Singapore and Hong Kong. It also pointed out:

Singapore came second in the latest international league of pupil achievement in maths, the UK was in 28th place. Shanghai came first.

Davies’ later programmes (if his accompanying book of the same title is anything to go by) are very likely to bring out the need for graduate engineers, if Britain is to undertake the necessary expansion of its manufacturing base. There is already no lack of demand: Dyson remarks “… the City loves engineers. I wish it didn't. I'm trying to lure another 400 bright minds to our Wiltshire laboratories.”

Rory Sutherland (vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK ) revealed in an article in the Spectator on 18 June, a marked contrast to the British way of running things :

This is from a 2007 blog, listing the Chinese politburo:

Hu Jintao, 62, President of the People’s Republic of China, graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, Department of Water Conservancy Engineering.
Huang Ju, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, Department of Electrical Engineering.
Jia Qinglin, 65, graduate of Hebei Engineering College, Department of Electric Power.
Li Changchun, 61, graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, Department of Electric Machinery.
Luo Gan, 69, graduate of Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Germany.
Wen Jiabao, 62, premier of State Council, graduate of Beijing Institute of Geology, Department of Geology and Minerals.
Wu Bangguo, 63, graduate of Tsinghua University, Department of Radio Engineering.
Wu Guanzheng, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, Power Department.
Zeng Qinghong, 65, graduate of Beijing Institute of Technology, Automatic Control Department.

I just checked to find out if anything had changed since 2007; perhaps they had recently decided to embrace diversity, appointing two female poets and someone with a background in contemporary dance. And so they have. Of the four new appointments since 2007, one is only in his late 50s and only three are engineers. Li Keqiang, the lone non-engineer of the nine, has a PhD in economics. This preponderance of engineers is not quite so exceptional as it first seems, since it reflects the communist fetish for heavy industry 45 years ago. And it is not all good — left unchecked, engineers are prone to devise grandstanding infrastructure projects that deliver little human value. But it is still revealing.

How many scientists are there in the House of Commons? Rather few, it seems. … No, I don’t want to be ruled by engineers. But you can’t deny that over the past 150 years they have solved more problems than politicians have.

China came up again in The Times when, kicking off its CEO Summit, it provided the results of a Populus opinion poll which had asked voters to rank the UK alongside its five major competitors on tax, infrastructure, skills, workforce and business friendliness, as summarised in the table below.

Obviously this is about public perceptions more than realities on the ground – after all how could “2,047 adults aged 18+ online between 17th June 2011 and 19th June 2011 across Great Britain”, and, “Generally speaking from everything you know or have heard or read”, be equipped to make such judgements?   38% of the sample had not taken a foreign holiday in the last three years, and 34% had left school before the age of 16. “Infrastructure” was defined “like the road & rail networks and other transport links” – but what about broadband, secure supplies of electricity and water, and so on?

Not that my views are likely to be of much value, either. I’ve been to the US and Germany in the last 10 years, but never to China or India, although I’ve probably been to France enough to have a stab at comparisons with the UK. Looking at the Table, the workforce skills relativities look dodgy: China second to Germany – one day maybe. France is almost certainly not fifth in workforce skills, nor behind the UK in my view, I’m sorry to say (plombiers being only a minor element of the French workforce). I also find it difficult to believe that France is worse than India as a place to set up a small business, and I wonder if France’s infrastructure is superior to Germany’s, taking the old East and West together, despite the enormous investment of recent years in the former. With its large fleet of nuclear reactors, France certainly won’t have Germany’s dependence on imported gas for electricity production in years to come.

To end on a more upbeat note, I see that BT send a ‘technician’, not an ‘engineer’, out to fix your stuff, unlike British Gas (see previous post). However, BT are well aware of the cost of what they call “wagon rolls” and, unless the problem is their fault, you may well get a bill shortly after the visit! I would expect that in China they are all called technicians.

Will the Queen Retire at 90?

I have no idea, but it is something to speculate about in an idle moment. Prince Philip was 90 last week (17 June), and told the BBC that he is "winding down" and reducing his workload as a senior member of the royal family. In an interview with the BBC's Fiona Bruce, the Queen's husband said: "I reckon I've done my bit." So might the Queen follow his example after her 90th birthday in April 2016?

Usually when the possibility of the Queen’s standing down is discussed, the idea is quickly ruled out on the grounds of the A-word. Certainly the Abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 represented a major crisis for the Royal Family at the time, but for most people who have seen The King’s Speech this year, Edward was as historically remote as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown. Very few people would begrudge the Queen’s stepping down after so many years of service, or would now regard it as being constitutionally destabilising. Although it might take a little time and effort to induce popular enthusiasm for Charles’ accession, if his sons were to make their support clear any public misgivings would probably soon disappear. All the better if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were to have produced an heir by 2016.

There might be political attractions too. Bruce Anderson in the FT recently described David Cameron as a man, “Absolute in his own intellectual self-confidence”. So presumably the PM is certain that coalition policies will lead to the British economy being well on the way to recovery by 2015. If so, in the election due that year the country could be expected to return a Conservative government. The PM at the time of the last Coronation, also towards the end of a period of enforced austerity, was Winston Churchill. David Kynaston in Family Britain 1951-1957 remarks (page 305) that the Coronation and the preceding period of anticipation “were not comfortable days for the British left, or indeed the progressive intelligentsia as a whole”. He goes on to quote Barbara Castle: “Winston has just introduced her [the Queen] on the radio, exploiting the romantic mood of the moment to its fruitiest uttermost.” Churchill left government two years later at the age of 80. If Cameron were to stand down in 2017, probably in favour of George Osborne, he would be only 51. But like Tony Blair he would then have time to earn a substantial amount, and he would be able to remove his children from Downing Street before their teenage years. SEE ADDENDUM 22 JUNE BELOW.

Some statistics provide another perspective. The chart below shows the lengths of the reigns of the Queen’s 10 predecessors (excluding Edward VIII) plotted against their age at accession. The data points for the Queen (QE2) and the future King Charles (C3) assume that they leave the throne at the age of 90 (ignoring actuarial considerations). Most sovereigns have been crowned in middle age or later, with only the two Queens and George III (G3) acceding under the age of 30. Queen Victoria (QV) was on the throne for more than 63 years, a record which the Queen will overtake by the end of 2015. If Charles were to accede in 2016, and follow the precedent set by his mother of retiring at 90, he would have reigned for over 15 years, longer than his grandfather and four other sovereigns in the preceding 300 years.

This all seems so neat that it is most unlikely to happen. The relevant non-conjectural data is tabulated below.

Beware of the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendar during the reign of George II!

ADDENDUM 22 JUNE: In his Daily Telegraph blog today, Benedict Brogan, who is reputedly close to Number 10, makes a good case for Boris Johnson being the other likely successor to David Cameron.  Johnson’s intimes “expect Mr Cameron to step aside some time in a second term to pursue other interests.”

ADDENDUM 20 MARCH 2012

This post still gets the occasional hit, so I should draw the attention of anyone who reads this far to the following. The Queen gave a speech to Parliament today to mark her 60 years on the throne. She said:

I have been privileged to witness some of that [nearly a thousand years of British] history and, with the support of my family, rededicate myself to the service of our great country and its people now and in the years to come.