Britain is still the world’s eighth largest manufacturer,but Brexit makes the need for support more critical than everFew politicians would want to quibble with the patriotic title of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on reviving industry this week: Build it in Britain. Successive governments have obediently sung the virtues and value of UK manufacturing. Yet they have had little discernible effect in halting or even slowing its decline. Brexit casts a forbidding light over this already gloomy landscape. Assessments show that manufacturing and other sectors would be worse off under every scenario for leaving. Manufacturers are already holding back on product development and training because of their concerns.
The shift in approach is genuine this time, and necessarily so. While the Institute of Directors dismissed the Labour leader’s call for government contracts to disappear to British firms as Trump-style protectionism, or there is growing appetite for state support. The distinction between beggar-my-neighbour economic nationalism and the prudent nurturing of domestic industry is not a tough line,but it is one of degree and nature as well as insight. Theresa May’s government has itself recognised the need for a greater state role.
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Source: theguardian.com