When Theresa May created a new Department of Business, Energy and
Industrial Strategy after taking office last summer, plenty of eyebrows
were raised. Industrial strategy, it was widely remarked,
was something attempted by the Labour governments of the 1960s and 70s –
and it had dismally failed. British Leyland, Concorde and Delorean were
the dead proof that governments were useless at "picking winners" and
shouldn’t attempt to. What was the new Prime Minister thinking?
A few commentators did observe that the concept of industrial strategy
had in fact been revived at the end of the Labour government and in the
early years of the Coalition. Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson had
successfully revived the motor industry in 2009-10
and initiated a new offshore wind manufacturing sector; Vince Cable and
David Willetts had identified key manufacturing growth sectors and
established new support systems for innovation. But they also pointed
out that this had been largely abandoned by the next Business Minister,
Sajid Javid, and was never embraced by David Cameron or George Osborne.
So what did May mean? We are about to find out, when the government publishes its green paper on industrial strategy today.
Read more...
