We also have a huge trade surplus in invisibles to the EU, which offsets our trade deficit in goods. Though outside the EU would we benefit from not being able to set the rules.

Few UK call centres could handle international calls because few people in this country speak foreign languages fluently; least of all those willing to take fairly low paid jobs and least of those any Asian language. We'd be dependant on skilled immigrants, who would probably prefer a better paid job somewhere with better weather.

I see nothing here we could sell to China and India.

Maybe they should start teaching Mandarin and Pinyin at primary schools already, to give as an edge in the future world markets.

Luxury Cars
Whiskey
Textiles

That's going to be a pretty small market though, surely?

And textiles, really? That surprises me. I know it was true at the start of the industrial revolution, but I'd have thought they produce their own cheap cloth now. I do rather like the idea of all our children working in mills again though; should keep them out of trouble.

College I used to work at - in an old mill town no less - used to get students from all over the world coming to learn how to do textiles on an industrial scale. It was the only bit of the place that made a profit.

In fact, if you want to look at something we still sell quite a lot of to the growth states, 'knowledge' is a pretty good place to start. The UK has a massive foreign student population, compared proportionally to other EU states. Plus several UK Universities have opened offshoots in Eastern countries. This is despite them having perfectly decent Universities of their own. Despite what we as locals might think about it, it seems there's a general perception that a UK university education is worth going to the UK and paying often a pretty massive sum of money for.

Now you'd think that was a losing proposition, that as we trained graduates who went back to China or Indonesia or wherever that would improve their own domestic HE sector as those graduates became researchers and lecturers and passed on the knowledge they paid for and they'd increasingly take the business away from us. But that doesn't seem to be happening, at least not at anything like the rate you'd expect. We've been training graduates from India and 'the subcontinent' for decades but the uptake rate hasn't slowed at all, in fact if anything it's accelerating and, as I say, it wasn't as if they didn't actually have universities before anyway.

Which brands are those then? The only British car firms I can bring to mind would be Ariel, Morgan, Caparo and Noble.
Niche to say the least. Rolls are BMW. Aston's are a owned by a group of people - no Brits.
Whiskey is a good one - but it's not a big employer nationally
Textiles - who've we got?

Jaguar Land Rover. Can't sell enough to China, apparently.

Last week's news for example, Honda announced job losses and everything was doom and gloom for the UK car industry. Without a pausing for breath the news readers then said Jaguar were taking new bods on.

I have noticed that "English as a foreign language" courses are always in demand. A lot of the people I was at college with used to teach it in their spare time. Oxford was unsurprisingly full of foreign students.

It's often commented that we're very good at exporting knowledge. We have world class scientific research, but aren't always good at "monetising" the results.

What surprised me was the idea of selling cheap cloth to China. They have quite a history of their own.

Owned by Tata.

This thread is depressing. What do we actually do - apart from moan about the EU?

It may be foreign-owned, like Mini, but at least the stuff is built in the UK. It counts as stuff we make here and can export.

Moan about the government. And the snow

If we're looking at it that way, we'll chuck in Ford, Nissan and Honda as British then too...
Yes, the provide jobs, but the companies profiting aren't UK based.

Agreed. Remember, though, that all those companies source components and sub-assemblies from local businesses. I would hope the parent companies also pay their fair share of the taxes in the UK, unlike some of the service industries we could name.

I believe, again a foreign-owned company now, the UK still makes some of the finest steel in the world.

Whatever, we have to face up to the fact we're not the manufacturing powerhouse we were in the first half of the 20th century. I think this reliance on the service sector over the past three decades or so is not going to help UK plc out of this recession in a hurry.

Getting away a little from manufacturing, another aspect of being in the EU is its effect on UK employment law and exactly what employers can do to their employees.
This is presumably one of the areas that the current government would be very keen to renegotiate so they could let their pals in business properly screw over their employees in the name of having a more flexible workforce that's easier to hire and fire at will.

One aspect that is in desperate need of renegotiation has got to be the Common Agricultural Policy. Sadly I suspect that the French would veto any significant changes.