Originally posted by beet1e
Part of the reason is that a lot of US jobs have been exported to places like China and India. Goods sold in WalMart which were formerly US made are now being produced in China and imported into the US.
You keep refering to the U.S. and it`s trade with China in many posts.
You use it in a way that would suggest that Britain does not trade nor import from China. Hell, I thought everyone did.
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Sweatshop imports from China swamp our seaports
by Steve Johnson
A FLOOD of cheap Chinese imports to Britain is now clogging up our harbours, swamping the handling capacity of the container ports whereever they dock.
Such is the imbalance between the volume of Asian imports and that of goods trickling out of Britain from what is left of our manufacturing industries, that containers of imported goods, instead of being filled up with exports and shipped out again, are piling up and bringing our seaports to a standstill.
Southampton recently found itself stuck with 25,000 empty containers. Normally no more than 12,000 are empty at any one time, but so great is the imbalance between imports and exports that the port was full to the brim with empty containers. Southampton has now imposed a limit oSo what has been Labour's response to this torrent of cheap sweatshop produce drowning our industry?
Only to welcome three more new major container ports, at Felixstowe, Harwich and on the Essex coast, to take even more imports! Chinese corporation Hutchinson Whampoa plans a port at Bathside Bay, Harwich, able to import 1,700,000 containers a year and one at Felixstowe South able to take 1,500,000 container-loads of cheap Chinese imports a year.
Even P&O wants to build a giant container port at 'London Gateway' on the north shore of the Thames Estuary to import 3,500,000 containers of foreign goods to undercut British industry.
The tonnage of imports has tripled over the last 30 years. In 2003, the last year for which figures are available, 4,500,000 containers of imported goods flooded into Britain. The three giant new ports planned will more than double that again!
A Government that allows such a doubling of the capacity of the Chinese and other Third World sweatshop economies to swamp our markets and undercut our produce is a bunch of turkeys eagerly working to bring forward Christmas!
We neither need nor want any more cheap imports to ruin our industries and put our people on the dole.
These imports are manufactured goods that we either do not need at all or can perfectly well make ourselves, here in Britain using our own workforce. It's time to close the flood-gates on cheap Chinese imports.