WINNING THE WAR ON WAGES:

I had the good fortune a few months ago, for example, to tour the Eurofighter Typhoon assembly shed at BAE's Warton factory on the Lancashire coast. A dozen of the world's most sophisticated warplanes could be seen at varying stages of completion in a silent, super-clean atmosphere that was more laboratory than shop floor.

I learned how millimetre-perfect alignment of nose, body and tail is achieved by laser technology, and how the steel frames on which the planes sit are piled deep into the sand beneath to eliminate tidal movement. I asked about the function of the wingtip pods, and was told they contain sensors that tell the plane what evasive action to take when fired at from the ground or the air: the pilot doesn't have to react, just let his computers fly him out of trouble. Indeed the pilot barely has to be hands-on at all, in the sense that the entire flight can be pre-programmed: he (or she) is the mission commander of an electronic masterpiece that flies itself.

And that's a useful metaphor for leading-edge manufacturing of all kinds today. It's an activity that has long since ceased to be noisy, dirty or labour-intensive; nowadays it is all about automation and quality control.

Another of my recent visits was to JCB in Staffordshire, where the product -- the ubiquitous yellow digger sold all over the globe -- is lower-tech than a fighter plane, but built by similar hi-tech methods that bear no relation to the dark, satanic mills and assembly lines of old. Likewise, at Cadbury's confectionery factory in Bourneville the image that sticks in my mind is of hip-shimmying robots in the packing area, working with extraordinary speed and precision.

This trend isn't new: the Nissan car factory on Wearside which produces more than half a million cars annually has been setting global standards for almost 30 years, combining British ingenuity and design excellence with the Japanese concepts of kaizen ('continuous improvement', actually borrowed from an American engineer called W. Edwards Deming) and poka-yoke ('Cut the cock-ups,' as a Nissan worker translated it for me on my tour).

The point is that the vast majority of Britons now-adays don't work in factories, or visit them, and are stuck with an old-fashioned vision of how they operate.

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