how many of those good old British brandnames are still British?

It's a question which France 2 TV examined in its bulletin Le Journal yesterday as it looked at the last week before the UK election.

The short answer is very few. As this article in the Guardian reports, the chocolate maker Cadbury is the latest of one-time big British brandnames to be sold and often transported to foreign interests, in this case the US food giant Kraft.

Like many British brandnames, Cadbury had a subsidiary here, in fact still does, although the "rationalisation" was followed by product changes which local consumers didn't like, to the huge benefit of its main NZ competitor, Whitakers.

Other brandnames have gone because of problems the UK has, others are still here but as in the UK the products are from factories elsewhere in the world - from the Czech Republic to China.