Only one in three of its stock seemed to be from abroad and that was from Portugal, so at least it props up the European Union.Shoes, though Oh dear Can you name a British shoe company? Clarks and Doc Martens Or a nice pair of brogues. “We do try,” said a floor manageress at the Oxford Street branch “But you just can’t get the skills here. You used to be able to, but it’s really hard now.”This is slightly at odds with the fact that the majority of British clothes around the place were the tailored type, but she must have known what she was talking about. Oasis, despite its ethnic-type name, also had a lot of UK goods – in viscose and Lycra.

Cotton was firmly Indian, Portugese and Greek.Warehouse I have always liked because its clothes are cheap enough to spill sangria down them. It was slightly sneaky in that whenever a label was inaccessible it seemed to say Hong Kong and, like Whistles, it was not cheap enough for beachwear, but still: top marks.Next has a good 50 per cent British stock. Whistles had classic-cut linens and beautiful jackets made in England. Its whackier stock is Italian, but you could certainly get the Audrey Hepburn look.Garden-party shop Hobbs, too, was crammed with “made in the UK” labels. However, it does sell nice thick British socks – I guess we can still weave.However, most of the other shops had a surprisingly high British head count, even if the labels were hidden with great aplomb. Kookai’s stock seems to come entirely from Portugal and France. Monsoon, with its standard “produced with help from weavers and dyers” labels, I did not even look at.

And Gap is a little world tour in itself: Hong Kong, Macao, Malaysia, India, Canada, the US and most of the Pacific basin. Made in France.So I gave up and went to do the bit which I had assumed would be most difficult: getting some holiday clothes that had not come from India.This proved to be quite a pleasant surprise. And Korean.I ran my eye along the shelf: British Telecom! This was about half the size again of the Samsung, and sported a pair of large pink and red buttons: colours that look good on very young people and terrible in my kitchen It was pounds 269 Oh, well Deep breath Then I saw the small print. Bush and Alba are Chinese – and Amstrad gets its stuff made there Sharp’s country of origin may vary. There was a neat little Samsung at pounds 199: no frills, black casing, flush buttons. As time dragged on, I found myself stretching these definitions further and further.

I became desperate, you see.When you think electronics, what names do you think of? Bush, Alba, Panasonic, Sharp, Compaq, Amstrad, Samsung Some are more obviously foreign than others. In the small but dinky electrical department at Peter “never knowingly undersold” Jones they are generous with labelling. There were a dozen faxes on display: plain faxes, phone faxes, ansafone faxes, faxes that defrost your ready-meal.Panasonic, I found, is a Japanese brand name. So I thought I would do my bit for the national economy.What exactly is a British product, though? A dress by a British designer knocked up in the Philippines? A car built in Sunderland for a Japanese company? Or only things originating here, in which case coffee and cigarettes are out. But there is a big difference between cutting a couple of countries off your shopping list and dropping all but the products of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: a world of differences, literally.
The other day I needed, in a hurry, to buy a fax, a ghetto blaster (my ghetto has been alarmingly quiet of late), some basic holiday gear, a cartload of cosmetics, some food for a dinner party and a couple of pairs of shoes.