Empty shelves are the only way Britain’s underpaid workers can grab national attention | Aditya Chakrabortty

If you don't care about workers, a vicious downward cycle works - as long as you can get them. Then one day, you can't

In the mid-noughties, I was economics producer at the BBC, working with the then economics editor, Evan Davis. He had just begun presenting a new programme called Dragons' Den, and had noticed something odd about the contestants. They would pitch up with their patter, their shiny prototypes, their occasionally plausible projections for how much cash would be rolling in by year three. And then, when asked how they actually planned to make their goods, they would shrug off this most fundamental of questions with a single word: China.

China! Anyone with a trial subscription to the Economist knew what magic could be worked there, even if they didn't know precisely how. It had factories and shipping containers and, most of all, vast numbers of workers to fill that yawning gap between spreadsheet and reality. The British no longer needed to cast themselves as makers; instead they could focus on the designing and the selling, the dreaming and the bullshitting.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist