"We don't make anything" and "there are no large British companies" are memes that help people feel better about perceived decline. It's not really representati

"We don't make anything" and "there are no large British companies" are memes that help people feel better about perceived decline. It's not really representative. https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100/constituents/table https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100/constit... ; you can easily sort by market cap. GW are on page 4. Perhaps remarkably close to the two supermarket chains, Sainsburys and M&S, but those are much lower margin. The top has "proper" global manufacturing companies: Astrazeneca, Unilever, Glaxo-SmithKline, BAE, Rolls-Royce. Along with the resource extraction companies, and Britain's major services export industry: banking. (oddity: there are two Coca-cola companies on the FTSE, CCEP and CCH, which presumably exists for some weird tax reason) Then you get into the question: what counts as a "British company"? There are plenty of overseas-owned UK success stories that are still significant UK employers and bringing money into the UK, such as ARM. Conversely, does a company which is listed on the FTSE but has most of its operations all over the world like RTZ count as "British"? Successful British startups quite often exit and vanish from discourse, while continuing to operate. To my mind the important questions are "does this bring in valuable forex?" and "does this result in substantial UK employment?" Those don't necessarily have to be in the same company. The big employer list looks different: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1218430/largest-uk-based-companies-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1218430/largest-uk-based... HSBC still up there (over 200k UK staff!), but there's a lot of food service (Compass), retail (Kingfisher you will know as B&Q) and so on. I've not even got into the videogame industry (very good export industry, and seemingly responsible for the success of Warhammer). If you insist on making physical objects your perspective is going to be unnecessarily narrow.