Launch time
You spend years promising a new strategy. You spend months and months debating it, analysing the best policies, finding the money, building consensus, get all the major involved parties on board, prepare to launch. You then have the PM back the policy with an article in the FT and then Trump launches a war on Iran.
So the UK’s new industrial strategy will get one tenth of the publicity it deserves, its costs, benefits and missed opportunities will pass most of us by and it will be a bit of a damp squib.
Which is a pity because in a sense the actual policies don’t matter that much, I mean they are really important and manufacturing industry have been telling me for years they desperately want and need a policy framework. But the key point is to have a strategy, in fact pretty much any strategy, so long as the concept of having a strategy takes hold and can get its roots established deeply and securely.
Because this new policy is a reversal of decades of Tory idealogical cant, that the state should not pick winners, interfere or do anything but get out of the way of business.
Business will however have noticed that government has not got out of its way and has in fact thrown endless obstacles in its path, including Brexit, and that its rivals enjoy working under governments which lay down long term policies, support, encouragement, and laws which give it the confidence to invest and expand.
The key to the success of this policy is therefore not necessarily the policies, (they can always be tweaked, changed or improved) but its duration, it has about 4 years guaranteed but if the next government just tears it up and throws it away then it will have been in vain.
Industry needs long term policies to make long term decisions, for that reason alone every major party should back this strategy and promise to maintain it.
But UK politics doesn’t work that way, there is more to be gained by all out attacks on everything, than agreeing to a consensus on a some sensible policies.
How long before the Tories launch their industrial strategy? Which will be nothing more than a return to do nothing politics.
From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
Don’t the tories back some companies on the quiet? Look where former tory ministers end up with nice directorships and consultancies - surely in return in part for previous favourable treatment?