The difference between Germany and Britain is that Germany still has large, successful and innovative hardware companies and it still has decent engineering jobs. Britain has lost them, together with the companies which once offered them.

But these jobs didn't vanish into thin air, they vanished to India and China, which now control the companies making "British" cars (MG, Lotus, Jaguar, Landrover, etc.).

There is the delusion in many Western people that e.g. China just can not do proper engineering and that outsourcing jobs there will not work. This is false. Most engineering jobs people do can be done just as well by people on the other side of the world for half the pay. The only reason you get paid twice the money for the same thing is institutional inertia, a company can not move it's development all at once to there other side of the world, so there need to be people locally to do engineering, even if it is more expensive. This is not something which will remain true forever.

These Hardware jobs are paid terribly because they well paid for the global market rate.

It is not geography, or lack of innovation or VCs. It is outsourcing.