I just don’t understand how with this society full of so many awesome evolved people we ended up with such fuckwits running the country

@ Caroline: “I just don’t understand how with this society full of so many awesome evolved people we ended up with such fuckwits running the country”

That is the predictable downstream consequence of New Labour screw-ups and defects – the unnecessary wars so Blair could flit around the world, the failure to regulate the banks and letting the house-price bubble inflate.

In 2007, before the financial crisis broke, general government expenditure in Britain, as a percentage of national GDP, was little more than in Germany and less than that in Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, France. The recession as the result of the financial crisis was deeper in Britain because the financial services sector is so much larger than in the rest of Europe. New Labour had no industrial policy to speak of, just daft ideas like that £12bn computer database to hold all personal medical records, which many predicted wouldn’t work at the start.

Just how desperate is Osborne that he starts jabbering about graphene? The stuff is years away from practical use. I’m still waiting for cold fusion. Hell I’m still waiting for the Mars landing, Maglev trains, self-driving cars and all the other fantastic stuff that was promised when I was a kid. If graphene does prove to be a miracle material and even if its pioneered in Britain you can guarantee Britain won’t benefit from it as the research will be hoovered up by foreign multinationals or squandered by British managerial incompetence. There’s a reason Microsoft and Apple dominate the computing world and Sinclair and Acorn are memories

@3 To be fair, Cold Fusion has pretty much been debunked, with only a couple of esoteric institutes across the world even having anyone take a nosy at the idea. So that’s why that one ain’t making waves.

What rot!
If you’re a super scientist and want to work here then you will be able to.

The cap is to stop the flood of non-working/yet another shelf stacker migrants who have no value at all to the country.
In fact with the cost of their housing, kids, NHS, Schooling and benefits MOST 3rd world/uneducated/unskilled migrants SUCK US DRY!

The cap is to ALLOW skilled and valuable migrants in and to stop the flood of backwards ghetto creators/leaches/criminals we are already sinking under.

Schmidt

Acorn => ARM Holdings Market Capitalization £7728m

@7 I’m familiar with ARM (its hard not to be) but Acorn was sold to Olivetti in the mid 80s after demand crashed. Apple survived that crash, Acorn should have been its rival.

Schmidt.

OK. Well I’m not sure why are you are so adamant the UK will fail to benefit from new technologies.

@3: “There’s a reason Microsoft and Apple dominate the computing world and Sinclair and Acorn are memories.”

Not so. Check out, instead, ARM Holdings, which is a spinoff from Acorn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings

ARM processors power most mobile phones and some tablets. The forthcoming Windows 8 is being compiled to run on ARM chips. ARM headoffice is in Cambridge.

Reasons for the dominance of Microsoft and Apple in computing include, among other factors, IBM pioneering the development of the market for 16-bit PCs and the sheer size of the American home market compared with Europe’s less affluent market fragmented by language barriers and persisting nationalistic buying tendencies despite the EU Single Market measures. Otherwise, try Robert Cringely: Accidental Empires (Penguin 1996).

Admittedly, Britain has a sad history with industrial policy but France has been much more successful – Renault and Peugeot indigenous car producers have retained the major share of France’s home market and nearly 80% of France’s low cost electricity supply comes from nuclear power.

In America, the early technical and market risks of developing microprocessors were underwritten by the US Defense Department and NASA for the space programme.

Recall that the official policy of the DTI up to June 2003 was for Britain to join the Eurozone. Thanks to Beckett, Mandelson, Byer and Hewitt, how out of touch that was.

Bob B

I am not sure France has been more successful:

The Inefficiency of Industrial and Innovation Policy in France:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/7054

Luis Enrique: “I am not sure France has been more successful”

At least, France was successful, for a time.

FWIW Harold Macmillan’s announcement in the spring of 1961 of the launch of a new National Economic Development Office (NEDO) and Council (NEDC) was in emulation of France’s technocratic and non-partisan Planning Commissariat.

During France’s Fourth Republic, the Planning Commissariat, with Pierre Masse as chief, had given stability to national industrial policy when governments there were changing about twice a year on average until the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and De Gaulle’s presidency.

He deserves the main credit for that enlightened switch to nuclear power using pressure water reactors while we were locked into the “not invented here syndrome” and backing the costly advance gas-cooled reactors because they were British.

Industrial policy in Britain has a sad record and we need to work out why. There are good examples – like the nationalisation of Rolls Royce in 1971 to save the company from collapse. The company was turned around and then eventually privatised in 1988. Since then Rolls Royce Aeroengines has become one of the few leading global producers of jet engines for airliners. But attempts to prop up indigenous motor manufacturers have been a costly disaster. Under New Labour, industry policy mostly amounted to promoting the financial services sector through a laissez-faire policy and the premier league professional football through a permissive stance on BSkyB, which paid out those huge sums to the FA for broadcasting rights.

In passing, a story was told by one of the many economists drafted in to work in Britain’s NEDO – Anthony Harris, to give credit where it is due. If the FBI (predecessor of the CBI) came up with any policy proposal, it was looked at especially carefully. If the TUC came up with a policy, it was looked at even more carefully. If the FBI and the TUC agreed on a policy, economists hid under their desks.

Btw another star frrom Silicon Fen, Autonomy, has been bought up by an American multinational – HP, in this case.

@4 – Cold fusion has uses. Just not, well, power generation.

(Medical muons and a couple of other areas)

@5 – You mean the sort of people who should be able to walk into America on O1 “superstar” visa’s? You’re wrong. Dead wrong. At least two people in my field were refused UK visa’s, but now have American O1 visa’s

(Look up the criteria for getting an O1, it’s /fascinating/)

130 jobs lost. And this is COMMON.

As part of the learning curve to redemption, try this on why Marconi went down the shoot:

“Marconi was once the jewel in the crown of British manufacturing. But disastrous investments have seen some of the worst losses in UK corporate history – over £5bn. The Money Programme investigates how a cautious company with billions in the bank set off on a rollercoaster ride to ruin.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3087333.stm

Who was the New Labour minister for industry in September 2001?

“Hewitt became a member of the Privy Council in 2001 and was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry from June 2001 until May 2005.” After the 2005 general election, she became health minister, which led to the debacle of that £12bn NHS project for all personal medical records.

So who replaced her as industry minister after the general election in May 2005? Alan Johnson, the trade unionist.

@13 – So the government is now responsible for private companies failing? Ah, right.

More propaganda. More disruption of the conversation. More national socialism.

@14: “@13 – So the government is now responsible for private companies failing? Ah, right.”

The New Labour government bailed out the banks in 2007/08 and it was a Conservative government which took Rolls Royce into public ownership in 1971 to save the company from collapse. The New Labour government did nothing to save Marconi from going down the shoot to oblivion. That was its industrial policy. Never mind. We could always watch premier league football on TV.

Of course, Blair as PM was pre-occupied in 2001. George W Bush on coming into office in January 2001 was already planning for the invasion of Iraq, months before 9/11 that year. Blair was working on that “special relationship”. Try this from the Independent report in May 2007:

February 2001: The first sign of an emerging “special relationship” came a month after the President was elected. Asked by a reporter what the two had in common, Bush responded with “Colgate toothpaste”.

September 2001: Nine days after 9/11, Blair appeared in the gallery of Congress as Bush made a speech in what pundits saw as the ultimate gesture of alliance. According to a former ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, Bush told Blair at dinner that he would attack Iraq whatever the Prime Minister said.

@15 – So, saving the entire economy or saving a company impacted by long term factors is equivalent to bailing out a single company which made terrible and risky short-term decisions?

It’d be funny it you were not just trolling again.

@12 I suspected Schmidt was specifically referring to the Fleischmann–Pons Cold fusion hubbub, when complaining about “still waiting for cold fusion”. The Muon-catalyzed fusion is technically a completely different process. (Despite essentially still being cold fusion)

@16: “It’d be funny it you were not just trolling again.”

Try not to be entirely obtuse.

A Conservative government took Rolls Royce into public ownership in 1971 to save the company from collapse and to honour its engine contracts, partly for fear British companies would otherwise lose credibility in international markets as manufacturers of high-tech products. The Blair government could have applied much the same industrial policy logic to save Marconi from oblivion. After all, at the time, it was Britain’s largest manufacturing company.

There was no need for Blair to sign up to Bush’s plan to attack Iraq. In 2001, Bush was planning to attack Iraq anyway, regardless of Blair. Blair could have stood by that keynote speech he made in April 1999 to the Chicago Economic Club:

“If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar.”

Savings on the £6bn spent by Britain on conducting the Iraq war could have gone towards turning Marconi around. As the company shares were worthless when it finally failed in 2001, there would have been no need to compensate shareholders for taking the company into public ownership.

The trouble for Blair with all that is that he would probably have missed out on that lucrative lecture tour in America when he stood down as PM.

Labour, with Ed Miliband as leader, needs to climb the learning curve on why New Labour lost electoral support. Calling me “a troll” only goes to show that you lack the wherewithal to respond to the analysis.

…YAWNS LOUDLY, STRECHES OUT MY ARMS, BLINKS A COUPLE OF TIMES…Well cheers for that bob, anyway…does anyone else fancy a pint, I certainly could do with one.

A predictable contribution on the perplexities of contructing and applying industrial policy – which helps to explain why Britain has its overdependence on financial services and why manufacturing only contributes about 13% to Britain’s GDP.