Thread by @BenChu_

Why is the government killing off its ‘Industrial Strategy’ and why should we care?

A thread...🧵

On the face of it this is something of a puzzle.

Some have suggested this is about “neoliberal” or Thatcherite ideology at work – an aversion to government intervention in the market....2/

Yet this is not a government averse to intervening in the private sector economy, to put it mildly.

There’s the furlough of millions of jobs and billions in state-guaranteed loans...3/

But it’s not just pandemic crisis interventions.

There’s the £400m government stake in the bust satellite company OneWeb and the creation of Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA)...4/

And the new UK Infrastructure Bank, sounds not dissimilar to the National Investment Bank proposed by Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.

So why kill off the Industrial Strategy "brand" when it looks like they’re rather keen on industrial strategy itself?...5/

And why do it when businesses, particularly in manufacturing, were solidly in favour of the strategy?

Read @MakeUKCampaigns boss Stephen Phipson's letter of dismay here to the business secretary...6/

makeuk.org/news-and-event…

Well, perhaps a clue lies in the fact that as well as dropping industrial strategy brand, they’re dropping the independent Industrial Strategy Council.

Do read a member of that council, @RSAMatthew , offering his take on that decision here...7/

https://twitter.com/RSAMatthew/status/1367463611887726593?s=20

But some sense something else too: an aversion not to intervention but to transparency and accountability.

The role of the Industrial Strategy Council was to provide “impartial and expert evaluation” of government’s progress in delivering the aims of its Industrial Strategy...8/

Is it that independent and expert SCRUTINY of interventions ministers disliked?

@Gilesyb of @instituteforgov, who worked on industrial strategy under May, now sees "a real risk of sheer ad hocery – a lot more One Webs and ARIAs and glitzy things but no uniting principle”...9/

And he fears that ministerial (or special advisor) whim and political considerations will take precedence over strategy and impartial analysis over interventions....10/

What discredited industrial strategy in the 1970s was that politicians’ short term political interests often took overrode hard-headed economic realism.

It took many decades for it to be rehabilitated in the UK...11/

The irony is that some think we're moving into a position where that happens all over again.

More here for @indypremium 👇

independent.co.uk/independentpre…