Techies are taking over national strategy

Just-in-time used to be the management consultant mantra to get British industry to drag manufacturing efficiency and productivity into the late 20th century. Cross-border Brexit friction and long-Covid in the supply chain means it’s more a case of when-we-can.
Just in time, is the expression that best describes Labour’s belated appointment of an investment minister and, separately, a chair for its industrial strategy advisory council ahead of Monday’s lovebombing investment summit.
Before last Thursday the new government had neither. The roles were looking a little tarnished after Benjamin Wegg-Prosser had turned down the former and Dame Carolyn McCall had spurned the latter. The approach to Wegg-Prosser, chief executive and founder of Global Counsel, had looked a little odd given his close connection to the not universally popular Labour peer Lord Mandelson.
As for McCall, her attributes leading ITV and easyJet are much lauded. But industrial strategy?
One of the eternal mysteries is that something always turns up. Poppy Gustafsson, the new investment minister, used to run the sinister-sounding Darktrace, operating in the even more sinister world of cybersecurity, before pocketing a lifetime of financial security within the last month with the company’s sale.
The role she has taken is to become Britain’s ambassador for foreign inward investment. At Darktrace she walked the walk. Her abundance of communications charm means she talks the talk too.
Clare Barclay, the UK chief executive of Microsoft, may not seem the obvious person to chair the industrial strategy council. But what with Microsoft’s central place in the government supply chain, she knows her way round Whitehall. Her advocacy of the role of AI in business may also help those from more staid parts of industry still trying to work out what AI is and what it means for them.
The era of the captains of industry, follicly-challenged men of a certain age, has passed, gone the way of the coal-fired power station. The techies, speaking in their strange IT tongues, have logged in.
Gustafsson, born when Mrs Thatcher was dismantling our industrial heritage, once encapsulated the pioneering mindset of the GenZ tech industry by remarking that experience is overrated. Something she won’t encounter with her fellow ministers.
Chopping, changing, churning, the use of sticking plasters. Sounds like life in a poorly run butchers, which is one way of categorising the last lot’s effort in government. These are words that Keir Starmer is promising to banish.
After glassesgate, Mrs Starmer’s frocksgate, Taylor Swiftgate — more gates than a medieval town — yesterday was the prime minister’s chance to get back to where he was on July 5 and re-pledge his commitment to business to change.
The promise of a new industrial strategy is not that it can be prefaced with “modern” or “green”. That Labour thinks it should be at the centre of its policy planning is change enough.
On one level, as the prime minister pointed out, it is simply about not needlessly insulting our closest allies or using swear words to describe business. In a flight of rhetorical fancy, he suggested government’s role is not to get into an argument about picking winners but making sure the pitch is mown, the changing rooms are usable and that the team is match fit.
His commitment to clear out regulations was accompanied by some tutting about another bonfire of the red tape, worries that health and safety may be compromised or, worse, that whole departments of human resources and compliance will have to be laid off.
But if he means his government is about getting out of the way of business, then it is exactly what executives have been demanding for years. Starmer knows he has a parliamentary supermajority on his side. Getting business back on the side of government really would be a novel strategy.
For those who enjoy the intellectual rigour and academic discipline of unravelling the complexities of the Cesarewitch (tip: the solution to one of the Turf’s biggest perennial conundrums is often to back the Irish horse you’ve never heard of), putative tax rises on the bookmakers is one for the notebook.
The indication, though, is that a tax attack on the old enemy may not be around the 3.40 at Newmarket but limited to higher levies on “harmful” gambling such as addictive online casino games.
The gaming companies, with their cavalier approach to customers’ wallets and mental health, have had this coming . No one can trust them to clean their own stable. Yet taxing them may not end the universal provision of such games nor solve the societal issue of problem gambling. The answer is regulatory.
Theirs is an industry which might benefit from some encouragement, as they say in the racing game. Hit hard. Where it hurts.
At the turn of the millennium, the automotive industry had a chronic issue with overcapacity. A quarter of a century later that hasn’t changed, simply moved to lower cost economies. But the car companies are whining like a badly engineered motor because people aren’t buying their pricey electric cars. The solution may not be as simple as advising them to build electric cars that are affordable. But it would be a start.
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