But though a call centre is a factory of sorts, it is not a production line; each person is doing an individual one-to-one job.Second, when we buy goods, even if they are mass-produced, the numbers of people employed on the production lines to make them has come down to perhaps a quarter of the level of 25 years ago, and will fall further. True, services are now being manufactured in ways that would have seemed odd even 10 years ago – think of call centres and dealing rooms as factories producing services. First, manufacturing as a whole is accounting for a smaller and smaller proportion of the economy of developed nations, for as we get richer we tend to spend a higher proportion of our income on services rather than goods. It is, so to speak, at the top of that chain.Now ponder this proposition: production lines will become less important. They dominated the 20th century, but they will not dominate the 21st to anything like the same extent.There are a number of reasons to support this view.

The motor car is interesting because it is the most complicated product in the world built on a production line. Aircraft production can be quite highly automated, but it is qualitatively different from the sort of production line that produces, say, a TV set. The earliest cars were made in batches, largely by hand.Today, this way of organising production continues in a few industries: for example, large aircraft engines and the aircraft themselves. There were factories for textiles, but in the last century most of the products of the industrial revolution were made individually Ships were one-offs, each different from the one before Railway engines were made in batches.

We tend to forget that until Henry Ford invented the production line, most manufacturing was craft-based. Mayflower has made a success of producing bodies for the new MGF and the new Rolls-Royce. The newest potential business, for those interested in such things, is sticking powerful motorcycle engines into snazzy two-seater sports-car bodies to create a new generation of funmobiles.The craft element in manufacturing – in retreat for two generations – is again becoming significant. Two particular qualities – creativity and craftsmanship – happen to abound in the UK, and in industries which require these, it is possible to dominate the world market.Sub-pockets of these craft-based motor manufacturing businesses keep developing into something more. The majority of the world’s Formula One cars are made here in Britain because the cluster of skills needed to make them happens to have developed here. There is one well-known example in the motor trade: racing cars.