At last, a call to arms for UK manufacturing The result, recently handed to Downing Street, is a passionate call to arms and it should be recommended reading for any Government minister bothered by manufacturing's relative decline in the UK. In the past decade 1.5m jobs have been lost in the sector and the share of total UK output is down 34pc since 2000. That compares to a fall of just 10pc in Germany. Such figures bother Sir Anthony, who has demanded a Whitehall champion with a "distinguished record" to promote manufacturing across departments. The figures should bother the Prime Minister as well, and possibly they do. Mr Cameron has associated himself closely with plans, for example, to launch a Queen's Award for Engineering, which we will hear more about this week. Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, is set to reveal the panel which will decide the winner of the £1m prize. Such awards are important. One of the factors highlighted by Sir Anthony's report is the view of many 16-19 year olds that manufacturing is "boring" and "poorly paid." We could do with a little injection of glamour, an engineering Oscars for the George Clooney of machine tool makers. Britain also has a particularly male dominated sector. Just 8.7pc of engineering professionals in the UK are women, the lowest figure in the European Union. That compares to 15.4pc in Germany. It is to be hoped that the awards announcement includes some leading engineers who happen to wear skirts. Role models are important. As the banks shrink their balance sheets, there has been much talk of "re-balancing" the UK economy. The problem is, has the Government created the right environment for manufacturing to flourish? Sir Anthony demands increased incentives for long-term capital investment (making things isn't cheap and requires up-front investment), an expansion of the Export Credits Guarantee Department and lower corporate and personal taxes. Over the longer term, he argues that there need to be more Technology Innovation Centres, a push for increased teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths at all levels in education and a public campaign to change perceptions of engineering. The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph will do their bit. As Sir Anthony has pointed out, newspapers are "things" and we are manufacturers with the best of them. Last summer both papers and telegraph.co.uk ran a campaign called Making It, highlighting British success stories and mapping out some positive plans for the future. Vince Cable, the business secretary, backed the initiative. We recommit to that campaign today and will raise further important issues ahead of the Budget in March. One simple win the Government could announce immediately is a reversal of the wrong-headed decision by the Department for Education to downgrade the value of the schools engineering diploma - from the equivalent of five GCSEs to one. If there are concerns over the diploma's academic rigour surely the response is to improve the diploma not lower the standard of the qualification? What signal is the present policy sending young people considering a career in engineering? In a speech last week Mr Cameron insisted that he was a pro-business Prime Minister. The very fact he had to reassure the nation shows how far the Coalition has allowed an "anti-business" and "anti-success" rhetoric to take hold in the UK. A positive policy on manufacturing would go a long way to "re-balancing" the direction this Government is heading. The Treasury's RBS blunder Stephen Hester, the chief executive of The Royal Bank of Scotland, is a man running two banks. On one side is a profitable Good Bank including retail which made a £6.1bn profit in 2011. It is about the size of Barclays. On the other, is the Bad Bank, the "ticking time bomb" which Mr Hester is slowly dismantling. The cash generated from the first is supporting the losses from the second and it will be up to three years before RBS is likely to see profits flow to the bottom line. Such facts have been lost in the noise over whether Mr Hester should or should not have received a bonus. And who is to blame for the shambolic way the announcement was handled? Step forward the Treasury which forced RBS to put out a statement on Mr Hester's remuneration before the bank's results were announced and before any other banking CEO had revealed their bonus arrangements. Mr Hester told the Treasury it was a mistake. He was right.