CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
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Can a family survive for a year buying only British-made goods? That's the challenge the Bradshaws from Kent have given themselves for 2013.
Angry at the failure of big corporations like Amazon and Starbucks to pay full rates of corporation tax James, Emily and their two-year-old son Lucan have decided to support British-owned firms and workers in troubled economic times.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21024336
@BritishFamily
They should drop the silly jingoistic aspect of it (like British companies would never fiddle their taxes). If their complaint is about multinationals offshoring their profits, what's wrong with buying fairtrade coffee from the Co-op?
Hope they already own their smart phones and windows computers. sounds like a great exercise in saving money because you'll not be buying much technology, bike parts, the list goes on. Even buying a new car you can buy a car assembled in the uk but the individual parts will be built else where and shipped in.
A more sensible (less headline grabbing) solution would be to buy more "ethically" (what ever that means to you) and buy from companies with good track records for tax and workers rights. The joy of capitalism, the consumer holds all the power. The problem with capitalism, the consumer never exercises their power.
Agree with above sentiments that it's a bit of a pointless, headline-grabbing exercise, whatever the good intentions.
I suppose they can have Silver Spoon (beet) sugar instead of Tate & Lyle (cane), even though you could say that the latter is a better product. You can get British table salt (it's dug out of a mine somewhere under Merseyside I think). So porridge is in, whichever way you like it. Tea and coffee are out, although I believe for a big premium you can buy some tea grown in Cornwall.
Sounds like their diet is going to be pretty mediaeval though. Or are things that were put in a can in Britain but grown elsewhere OK?
if I was going to do this, I would want to start in the summer and freeze/can lots of veg & fruit!
I think it sounds like a really interesting exercise. Lots of things that don't grow here would be out but it would really make you think about where stuff comes from.
No
Do'nt think they would be the Co-op
The Fife Diet has already tried this, for food anyway and claim to have managed. They even promote the concept. Here's their smoothie maker at Crail Harbour:
Fife Diet Smoothie Bike by Cycling Mollie, on Flickr
I would have run it off the back wheel.
I think it's a wee bit extreme - I source as much of my food as possible from the Farmers' Market, and my mates allotment, but I'm not going without tea or coffee, olive oil or any one of a huge number of foods. Minimising where possible my food milage, but being realistic, I feel. And it's all organic and free range (and minimally packed).
Apropos very little, my guitars and all bar one of my bikes are British, but that probably doesn't mean british made, alas.
Got bored and read to the end of the article. Not sure if this is serious and the guy is completely deluded or the writer and dude are having a little fun with dear reader!
But he has already made his own valve radio and is convinced there will be enough British-made component parts for him to make his own mobile phone.
Dave Yates MTB is made from Columbus tubing. Three Reynolds 531 frames one Pashley and three Bromptons. The Ti bits of Brompton were fabricated in China all the other frames were made in England and the Reynolds tubes were made there too. I don't know where Brompton or Pashley get their tubes. I think Pashley did try to make the Britannia a few years ago which was all sourced from the uk but Sturmey Archer moving to Taiwan stopped that.
Six of them have Brooks saddles. If I could sneak it past the memsahib I'd fit one of their Ti saddles to the superlight Brompton but that's further down the list behind a Schmidt light set for the S6L and a BWR hub for the M6R.
Plenty of 'vintage' British made bike components on the second hand market. Might have a job finding wheel rims and spokes mind you.....unless it's a (very) old Raleigh or similar.
And old Raleighs sometimes have non standard bits. I've been mulling the 700 vs 27" wheel issue for years. I suspect I'lll ask the mighty Gow to build some 700s one day.
Brooks saddles
The leather in a Brooks isn't British though.
And Reynolds export the tubes that then get cut and built and re-imported as frames from the far east.
Now there's the carbon footprint of a charcoal sasquatch
Hey-ho
I really don't have a problem buying "foreign things" that are cheaper and better and better made than the home-grown competition that they killed. I'm thinking consumer goods here, when it comes to food it makes sense to try buy local and seasonal. You have to be careful though, British-grown tomatoes available in winter have probably been under a poly-tunnel heated by gas burning and lit by fluorescent tubing - buying them from somewhere where they are in season might end up having a lower carbon footprint.
People (in the generalist sense) go mad for their smart phones and plasma TVs and so on, but don't always bear much thought to the factories that produce them and the workers who slave away inside. But those tech companies in competing in the marketplace take advantage of countries whose labour costs are low, and pared to the absolute bone for productivity vs. embedded cost. But that's mass production for you. What real choice is there? People don't want to pay more than they have to for Stuff, unless it's that good, and the marketplace has become designed that way. British-designed ≠ British-assembled ≠ British-made.
The British bicycle is a bit of a cottage industry now, perhaps a generously-proportioned cottage with a conservatory and an attic conversion, but even small outfits get frames made in Taiwan. You can buy a Dyson vacuum cleaner, but it'll be assembled elsewhere, unless it's one of the original series. Some things made in Britain were absolutely awful too, but stemmed from poor management and ill-judged business models, rather than outright lack of ability in the design or the production.
If I was a company director, I would be in business to make money, and part of that would no doubt be employing someone to figure out how to give as little of that money away to the Treasury. Being a good company director is about finding the best combination of ruthlessness and reasonableness.
I'd quite like to buy British, as much for supporting local economy as well as an overinflated sense of 'British', the time when we Made Things. The only bike I have that was designed and made in Britain is my Brompton. The others...well, no-one makes a bike like that here. And if we did, the price would have to be enormous to reflect cost of living.
K, interesting point about determining the break-even point for embodied carbon in food. Natural gas produces less CO2 than the equivalent energy from diesel trucks and gas-oil in ship engines, but the ships carrying in bulk might balance the advantage of a warmer climate. If the grid can be decarbonised significantly by 2050, as DECC predicts for an ideal scenario, home growing might make a real return.
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