Look outside London, and British enterprise is flourishing

It’s true that we have few industrialists with a global footprint, names that the consumer can recognise, like Dyson, JCB or Rolls Royce. But while we don’t value them at home, Britain’s problem-solving genius is very much appreciated abroad. British engineers are great improvisers, and can be relied onto crack the hardest part of the puzzle, American entrepreneurs and investors often tell me.

Take space, for example. We don’t build huge launch vehicles – rockets – but then we don’t need to. Our ground stations and networks already provide the nervous system of the free world’s private space programmes.

As I wrote in May, we’re creating the first orbiting factory in space, producing “the saffron of the semiconductor world”: the very highest grade silicon carbide. Space Forge is based on premises in Rumney, near Cardiff, that even the local paper calls “unassuming”, and where Google Street View fears to tread.

Our historic skills in devising instruments and radio create real jobs in robotics, semiconductor and telecommunications equipment, even if the badge may say Apple or Ericsson. We make vital parts such as gyroscopes, or landing systems, or an aircraft’s avionics system.

Medical devices, where over 500 British companies do trade, almost all small businesses. Some of the world’s hardest engineering challenges seem staggeringly prosaic: a safe dry deck shelter for divers, or decontaminating a hospital. If we have the scientific know how, why not?

So why is enterprise flourishing so far and wide? Companies which were already geographically dispersed have been chased further out of cities by high business rates and hostile urban policies. Local authorities delight in annoying car owners and families.

This becomes tiresome for employees with young children, who need to shoot off to a school pick up quickly. Or stick a prototype in the boot. Neither is easily done on public transport. Oxford and Cambridge are already overcrowded and expensive before they started to persecute drivers for fun. You really need a good reason to stick around.

Gibson thinks our hi-tech “back to the land” revolution is only half complete. Taiwan, he points out, fostered its first industrial workshops on its farms, after land reform. Might it make sense to encourage farmers to allow workshops to spring up on their fields, with accommodation on the floor above them? If you can find so much talent just off the B1135, why not encourage it more in the Midlands and the North, too?

Now we’ve woken up from the consequences of globalisation, these are questions worth asking. Our policy class believed that everything would be made in China, and this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet the Thatcher era still had strong industrial champions in the Cabinet, like Lord Young; today, hostility to industry on the right has never been more fierce.

In early 2015, a book appeared advocating a new vision of wealth creation, by a respected economist, Douglas McWilliams. In “The Flat White Economy” he lauded what he’d seen in Shoreditch: hipsters at software companies, and advertising agencies – he didn’t really differentiate between the two. Few books from 2015 have dated as badly.

I mention this because today’s engineer-entrepreneur finds themselves in a bind. Labour doesn’t have the historical antipathy to high value engineering and manufacturing that some on the intellectual right clearly have. But today finds Williams heading up Liz Truss’ Growth Commission, and we can be sure the wonkish vision doesn’t have a lot of high value industry on offer. It’s more likely to get excited about crypto, lab grown meat, and open borders. Good luck selling any of that in the Red Wall.

Seeing how Britain is flourishing requires a trip to some unlikely locations, far beyond TFL Zone 2. I’d advise urge all policy makers to go and find it. We’re very good at making things that the world wants. So wouldn’t it make sense to do more of it?