Where were we in the 50's
Top of everything, bikes, ships, steel, cars, the lot. The first three went long ago and did we see the writing on the wall.
Where are we now
Over 50% of the working population are civil servants, probably 25% are making forms for the civil servants to send to us to fill in. The rest of us are doing computer somethings and not actually bringing money into the UK.
When I started doing a degree in Mechanical Engineering most people said "oh so you can fix my car then"
I started out in a noble profession where we in this country rated Engineers pretty low despite studying for 4 years, in other countries such as Germany an Engineer was rated almost as high as a Doctor.
When I qualified I had a choice: Production Engineer on £7k or a Sales Engineer on £9k basic with a comapny Cortina, though choice. Wonder why we don't make anything anymore?