Industrial strategy

Britain didn’t choose to become a country that mostly manages other people’s money. It drifted there, one privatisation and one foreign takeover at a time, while telling itself each individual decision was just the market working efficiently. The cumulative result is a economy where financial and business services generate a wildly disproportionate share of output and exports, North Sea oil revenue vanished into current spending instead of national wealth, and strategic industrial assets (steel, semiconductors, ports) get rescued by the state only after a foreign owner has already run them down and a crisis is unavoidable. None of this requires…