Northern passions: Manchester United
‘Industrial policy.’ There’s a sexy phrase. It will set the heart racing right up there with ‘solutions provider’ and ‘constituency chairman’. It reeks of the 1970s: failure, When the Lights Went Out and historic government memos read by PHD students in Sussex between episodes of Countdown.
But the fact is that in our glossy, perhaps a little self-righteously autonomous UK television industry, we’ve always been part of, and massive beneficiaries of, a deliberate, multi-faceted, and incredibly successful industrial policy. It’s no less thought thorough, or effective, or long termist, than China’s entry into electronics over the past decade, or France’s nuclear power generation.
