As I am well acquainted with the hon. Gentleman, I am not the least surprised by his nerve.

The most up-to-date comparison of numbers of technicians in manufacturing in Britain, France and Germany gives us some clue to our economic performance. Whereas Britain has 31 per cent. of technicians with no qualifications at all, France has only 27 per cent. and Germany only 8 per cent. At the critical intermediate level of those who are qualified, we find that France is about 10 or 15 per cent. ahead of Britain and Germany is producing 30 per cent. more qualified people a year.

The report goes on to study the effect of this skills gap on our companies. Based on interviews conducted with people in British industry, it concludes: In Britain foremen in both spinning and engineering frequently mention that crisis management, chasing missing materials, rescheduling to cope with machine breakdown or training new staff where turnover was very high and new employees were normally untrained occupied the greater part of their time. The study goes on to compare the numbers of foremen and supervisors with qualifications in different countries. In the past decade, Britain has trained about 50,000 of them; in the same period, Germany has trained 50,000 every single year. Surely that is why we are not doing as well as we should.