I am not sure what we were expecting really, but let’s face it, there is a very long history of the UK inventing stuff and everyone else making billions out of actually turning it into a mass marketed products.
So the news that, a company spun out from Oxford University to make develop solar panels is planning to float almost anywhere but the UK and build a factory nearly anywhere else but the UK should come as no surprise.
But Oxford PV even goes as far as to say that the UK is the “least attractive” market in which to locate its new factory.
Now that is going it a bit, we really are upping our game. Forget computers and microwaves, we tried to make those and failed but this brand new technology of the future will be made somewhere else because the UK is the “least attractive” place to build them.
What a triumph for our stock market, our industrial policy, our tax system, our economy and the government.
We have now moved on from trying and failing to make things in the UK, to just failing to make them here, Think of the savings, we will no longer waste vast amounts of time and money trying. Hopes will no longer be raised only to be dashed, factories will not have to be built, only to stand empty after they collapse in the face of foreign competition.
We can just move straight on to the failing.
If this doesn’t tell you that the government has already lost the race for the UK to be a significant player in new green technology nothing will.
We are not even bothering to try to take part in the next industrial revolution.
We will be left behind, in fact we already are being left behind.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
So much for “sunlit uplands” and the alleged myriad benefits of “freedom from the oppressive shackles of Europe”. We used to be the sick man of Europe - now we’re just a sick joke