Tristram Hunt

The British workforce needs skills to compete, not a race to the bottom

When J.B. Priestley visited Stoke-on-Trent on his 1934 ‘English Journey,’ he tried his hand throwing a vase at the Wedgwood factory in Etruria. It is fair to say, he lacked the skills.

After a lot of jokes about ‘jollying’ and ‘jiggering’ and watching his vase flop back into clay, Priestley praised the craftsmen ‘doing something that they can do better than anybody else, and they know it … Here is the supreme triumph of man’s creative thumb.’

Well, times have changed, but the way in which opinion formers think about skills has failed to move on much from Priestley. Of course, craft and artisanal skills remain essential to industries like the potteries, but the broader British workforce deserves a modern skills settlement.

To prove the point, this week a global survey by PriceWaterhouseCoopers of over 1,300 CEOs revealed that UK business leaders are more concerned about the availability of key skills than any of their Western European counterparts, rating it as the greatest threat to their business’ growth.

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