1/ I’m now on X and have a blog – the first post is about how countries use their productive capacity to increase their national power.

Link to full report here:

To ensure that interventions can be focused and based on rigour, we propose a 4-step framework based on Ding and Dafoe’s ‘The Logic of Strategic Assets’ that should be adopted by the unit and the taskforces.

A No.10-HMT unit should deliver part of the strategy. Led by a Prime Minister’s Adviser on Strategic Capabilities, with £8-9 billion of funding to be deployed on 4-6 strategic capabilities over the Parliament. An expert-led taskforce should be created for each capability area.

The government’s sectoral approach avoids upsetting stakeholders, but lacks precision. Delivering industrial strategy through normal Whitehall structures will lead to the same result - money spread thinly with little benefit.

The Industrial Strategy must rebuild these capabilities through growth-driving supply-side reforms and targeted demand-side interventions, underpinned by institutional reform. We outline how government can be set up to deliver the demand-side interventions.

In key strategic domains Britain is falling behind. Only 2 of the world’s top 100 R&D-investing firms are UK-located. Without Google-owned DeepMind the UK’s share of top-tier AI citations falls from 7.84% to 1.86%. We are installing industrial robots 70x slower than China.

During the pandemic, nations with domestic pharmaceutical capacity used it for geopolitical leverage. Kate Bingham’s book outlines how the German government threatened to withhold access to Roche reagents if the US carried out its planned seizure of vaccine supplies.

Throughout history, strategic advantage has belonged to countries with productive capacity. In WWII, Britain and the US repurposed their manufacturing industries to produce tanks and jet engines.

National prosperity and security depend on strategic capabilities – eg vaccine production. Britain’s capabilities have been allowed to wither. I wrote for @BritishProgress with @ersatzben, @ludunsb + @andrewjb_ about how the Industrial Strategy can rebuild them.

7/ The full essay is linked in my bio.

6/ Britain needs a new path. We urgently need aggressive energy, planning and infrastructure reforms, but alone these won’t be enough. They should be combined with an industrial policy that cultivates strategically valuable firms and structural reforms to our state capacity.

5/ Britain has for too long equated deindustrialisation with progress. We must recognise that not all economic activity has equal value. A country that produces drones is far stronger than one that builds dating apps.

4/ In response, after years of neglecting manufacturing, the US is trying to reshore critical industries.

3/ China understands this. For the last decade they’ve aimed to control production of the technologies that will shape the 21st century. They now dominate manufacturing in key sectors like batteries and drones.

2/ Throughout history, countries' domestic industries have been deployed as geopolitical tools, whether it was the UK tapping telecoms networks for intelligence in WW1 or the US using its automotive industry for armament production in WW2.