Can anyone remember a time when the UK government didn’t say it had an industrial policy, only for it to turn out to be little more than a bag of wind?
It seems to be just another case of the fear of not being seen as totally free market meaning that the state is incapable of doing anything.
The fact that free market economies across the globe actually have such policies seems to matter not one jot. The dead hand of myth hangs over the issue and it is doing immense damage.
In short, if the UK can’t build several multi billion pound gigafactories, to build car batteries, the car industry in the UK is a dead man walking. Building petrol and diesel cars will be illegal by 2030, just 7 years away.
No one is going to invest in new petrol or diesel production lines if they only have 7 years to run. They are making the decision about where and whether to build their electric car factories now and the UK has virtually no battery capacity.
The collapse of BritishVolt ending any prospect of the UK even pretending to try to build that capacity.
What was desperately needed was either a government policy of running down the car industry or building battery capacity. The decision should have been made when the government decided the industry should go electric, if not before.
Instead it did nothing, now it is too late.
If anyone sees an industrial policy, do let me know. I won’t hold my breath.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
This is another Brexit problem, of course. The UK could continue to build electric cars and simply import the batteries from one of numerous battery factories being built around the EU, but then the resulting car would not be counted as a sufficiently UK-made product under EU's "rules of origin" so would attract EU import duty if the car (with EU battery) were to be exported to an EU country. So it would not be competitive. On the other hand if we were still in the EU, this would be no problem at all.