Orson Welles said film-making was the biggest electric train set a boy ever had. He was wrong. A new high-speed train line

would be, if the boy or girl grew up to engineer it. But in Britain, the train set is broken and has been packed away in the attic. We’re not proud of industry and we certainly don’t want our kids to grow up to be engineers. It’s a tragedy. It never used to be this way.

Children are mini-engineers and it’s their rite of passage to pull anything mechanical apart to get at the guts. As a child, I pored over Eagle magazine cut-aways that delved into the workings of everything from Bloodhound missiles to offshore oil rigs. Rather than the aesthetic, it was the innards that intrigued and inspired. The inventions all seemed to herald a brave new world of British prosperity that never transpired, at least not in its engineering guise. Instead, we became obsessed with the surface (but more of that later).

So the young are innately curious about how and why things work. Engineering gets stigmatised and we encourage our kids to become “professionals” - lawyers, accountants, doctors. Engineers are not accorded the status they deserve. We celebrate designers and architects, but forget the clever people who turn the theory into reality. Successful manufacturing is born of pioneering engineers and inventors. Look at Japan’s Akio Morita at Sony and Soichiro Honda. Both companies are finding current conditions tough, but you cannot ignore their spirit of inventiveness. Take the British car industry. In the 1950s, half of the world’s cars were manufactured in Britain. But beginning with the formation of the British Motor Corporation, the car industry’s emphasis on invention gradually bowed to commercial pressure and government intervention. In a desperate effort to balance the books, the industry was soon ground down by internal rivalries, lacklustre designs and labour disputes. Good invention was forgotten.Today, besides the recently appointed science minister Lord Drayson, engineers are not represented in the highest levels of British government.

While we will struggle to compete with growing industrial economies on the speed and efficiency of assembly lines, we can compete through ideas and technology. To do this we need bright engineers. But there aren’t enough. Just 4% of undergraduates read engineering and fewer still actually end up in the profession. This is worrying. Making things is still the future. Manufacturing accounts for half of our exports. But we import more than we export to the total of around £8bn a month. That’s more than £90bn a year in the red. Unlike the US, we don’t have a huge internal economy we can rely on to help support us in this difficult time. The UK can’t afford to be protectionist - we’ve always been exporters. The trouble is that we’re running out of things to sell.

In the United Kingdom, projects get caught up in planning regulations, never to see the light of day. We need to rediscover that fascination with that train set of our childhood. We’ve built our modern economy on the service sector, loans, banking and the dotcom bubble. Now that’s collapsed, we should seek to base it on something long term with solid foundations. If we don’t, we risk losing an already weakened position for good. Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.