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Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Nigel Farage promises a lot – but do Reform's sums add up?
Nigel Farage was in giveaway mode on Tuesday as he promised a Reform UK government would nearly double the personal income tax allowance, restore winter fuel support for pensioners and scrap the two-child benefit cap. The policies are appealing to voters, but are they affordable? Farage admitted people would be ' lined up in droves ' to ask how, or even if, his party could bankroll such policies. If Farage were prime minister, the promise to increase the personal income tax allowance from £12,570 to £20,000 a year would alone force him to find anything from £50bn to £80bn, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates. Benefits giveaways would add billions on top of that. Scrapping the two-child benefit cap would cost £3.4bn a year, the IFS has estimated, while restoring the winter fuel allowance would cost around £1.5bn per year. A promise of a transferable tax allowance for married couples hasn't been costed. Farage has repeatedly attacked the Starmer Government for being 'hopelessly adrift' on public debt, which is hovering at about 95pc of GDP. He therefore wouldn't be borrowing his way towards honouring his pledges if he moved into Downing Street. Instead, the Reform UK leader has promised 'big savings'. 'Big' is no exaggeration. At the lower end of the IFS estimated cost of the income tax change alone, he's looking for savings equivalent to the Government's annual spending on defence, or on the entire disability and child benefit system. At the £80bn top end, it's more than the Government spends on schools each year, or, to take another measure, almost half the central government payroll. He probably isn't going to sack every second civil servant on day one. So how will he pull off the feat of balancing the books, when it has eluded governments of the Left and Right for decades? Farage has promised full details next year. In the meantime, his downpayment is a claim that ' scrapping net zero ' would save £45bn a year – a 50pc increase on the £30bn estimate that Reform MP Richard Tice floated as recently as two weeks ago. Ripping up public-sector diversity initiatives would yield another £7bn a year, which sounds as vague as it is optimistic. The traditional bonfire of the quangos will reap £13bn a year. Asylum seeker hotels would also go, which Reform says will yield £4bn a year despite the fact National Audit Office figures suggest the party might claw back less than half of that. In an interview with The Telegraph last week, Tice acknowledged that a Reform UK government taking office in 2029 would need a much clearer set of plans than this. 'These are the tax cuts I want to get to,' he said. 'But we can't implement them until I've proven that I can produce the savings.' Those comments came after stockbroking firm Panmure Liberum said the £80bn funding gap – which it had identified even before this week's fresh promises – could trigger an 'immediate and violent' sterling crisis, reminiscent of the market meltdown after Liz Truss's mini-Budget. Labour also invoked the spirit of Truss on Tuesday, with party chairman Ellie Reeves saying Farage's 'tens of billions of pounds of fantasy promises … are exactly how Liz Truss crashed the economy'. Unlike the impatient Truss, though, Farage seems ready to play a longer game. And he'll need to. As IFS deputy director Helen Miller said on Tuesday, cuts of the magnitude he envisions can't be achieved by scrapping the odd superfluous quango or diversity programme, as Farage seems to suggest. Instead, it requires a 'debate ... about the vision of the state and what role the government should play in coming years,' she said. In other words, Farage may theoretically be able to make the sums add up on his slate of policy promises but only if the state cuts back on, or even drops, huge amounts of what it does. This is a debate that Tice, at least, seems up for. In an article for The Telegraph last week, he was even prepared to take on the Westminster shibboleth that the NHS must remain untainted by the private sector. A tax break would encourage wealthier people to go private, he said, and the NHS should buy 'millions more' appointments from private healthcare providers. These appointments would still be provided free to NHS patients, so they would come at a cost to taxpayers. Tice's bet must be that the private sector would get bigger and more efficient as a result, making the service cheaper overall. Clearly, much more detail is needed. It may be hard, in many quarters, for Farage and Tice to get a hearing for any plan to fundamentally rewire the British state – if they come up with one. But it's a debate Labour should welcome, rather than seek to smother. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is boxed in, and constantly at risk of running out of fiscal headroom. If there is a politically palatable path to disrupting the fiscal status quo, she hasn't found it yet either. Farage says that what he offers is a chance to think differently. 'We're not ideologically tied to the same ideas upon which we believe the Conservative and Labour governments have gone so wrong over the course of the last few years,' as he put it. Reform UK wants to embrace a low-tax and high-benefit society, combining two positions that have traditionally been diametrically opposed in Britain.
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
The New Industrial Strategy: Who Will Win The Jobs Of Tomorrow
Governments around the world are scrambling to adopt the right industrial strategy to stay competitive in the global race for the jobs of tomorrow. In the United States, the Trump administration's tariff strategy is primarily aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the country. In Australia, the newly re-elected Albanese Labor government is placing a AUD $ 20 billion+ bet on green manufacturing to reindustrialize the nation. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Starmer government has launched a 10-year AI Opportunities Action Plan, focused on scaling compute infrastructure and making Britain a global hub for AI-driven jobs. With the World Economic Forum forecasting that nearly as many jobs will disappear as will be created in the coming decade, the stakes could not be higher. In a world shaped by technological disruption, geopolitical realignment, and climate volatility, no single lever is enough. What matters is the alignment of skills, sector focus, and smart incentives, which ought to be the building blocks of any serious strategy for job creation and industrial renewal. These are the three questions every government must answer to compete for the next wave of jobs. This question comes first for a reason. No matter which industries a country prioritizes—or how much capital it attracts—none of it sticks without the right talent. Education systems are the foundation that determines whether a country can attract, retain, and grow the industries of tomorrow. Ireland's rise from a struggling, high-emigration economy in the 1980s to a high-income innovation hub is one of the most striking industrial policy success stories of the modern era. While often credited to low corporate tax rates, what also kept companies like Apple, Google, and Pfizer there and growing was talent. Firms like Intel, Meta, and Alphabet have consistently cited Ireland's skilled workforce as a key reason for their success. By contrast, one of the most high-profile failures of the past decade—the $10 billion Foxconn deal in Wisconsin—collapsed in part because the local workforce reportedly lacked the specialized skills needed to support advanced manufacturing. There are many ways to upskill a population, both in the short and long term. In markets with clear potential, the private sector is already stepping in. In South Africa, Microsoft and Google have launched large-scale training programs in AI and digital skills, viewing widespread youth unemployment as an opportunity to build a future-ready workforce. Such initiatives are tailored to meet real and immediate job demand. As Evan Jones, CEO of Collective X, puts it: 'We're not just skilling for the sake of it—we're skilling for absorption.' Collective X is a public-private partnership tackling South Africa's digital skills gap at scale. It manages a R500 million ($28 million) outcomes-based fund that only pays training providers when learners are placed in real jobs. To date, over 500 organizations have signed on. But while short-term technical bootcamps may fill immediate gaps, they're no substitute for long-term talent strategy. That starts with reforming higher education. According to the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report, the fastest-growing roles—from AI engineers to renewable energy technicians—require not only technical skills but also adaptive capabilities such as analytical thinking, creativity, and complex problem-solving. These are precisely what traditional lecture-based university models struggle to deliver on a large scale. To stay competitive, universities must evolve from passive knowledge providers and rethink not only what students learn, but also how they learn. One promising approach is peer-to-peer learning, a student-driven, project-based approach that fosters collaboration, initiative, and effective communication. Paired with co-designed curricula and digital platforms, it helps bridge the gap between academic theory and real-world readiness. Countries that embed these models into their higher education systems have a better chance of attracting investment and retaining talent at home. Some countries, such as the U.S., can afford to bet on multiple high-growth sectors. However, even the U.S. faces trade-offs, including talent, infrastructure, and political bandwidth. No country can do everything well. In a world of limited resources and global competition, focus matters. That means setting priorities, making trade-offs, and resisting the urge to chase everything because trying to do it all often means doing none of it well. India's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) offer a cautionary tale. Meant to boost exports across dozens of sectors, many fell short of their targets. A World Bank report blamed 'policy fragmentation, lack of sector focus, and poor coordination.' Some zones became real estate plays; a few built lasting industrial strength. By contrast, one often-overlooked sector with real potential is the creative economy. When Bill Gates recently named the three job categories most resilient to AI—pharma, energy, and coders—music, film, and live events didn't make the cut. Yet countries like Nigeria and Kenya are leaning into the creative economy as potential job creators. Nigerian artists now top global charts, Nollywood is among the world's largest film industries, and Kenyan animators and storytellers are gaining traction across the continent. A range of ancillary industries and services will be needed to support this momentum. UNCTAD estimates that Africa's creative economy could generate up to 20 million jobs by 2030, particularly for young people and women. One example: Move Afrika, a touring platform backed by Global Citizen, created over 1,000 jobs during its stop in Kigali and increased local sourcing from 75% to 90% in just 18 months (Disclaimer: I work for Global Citizen). However, transforming the creative economy into a genuine engine of job creation will require a proper policy framework—modern copyright laws, fair digital revenue-sharing, and robust intellectual property protections. This is especially urgent as broad exemptions to copyright are being proposed in several jurisdictions, threatening the ability of artists and creators to earn a living, and, by extension, generate jobs. This is precisely why the Music and Entertainment Development Initiative (MEDI) was launched: to provide governments with the data needed to justify innovative policy frameworks and unlock the full economic potential of their creative economies. MEDI is mapping music ecosystems across 22 African countries and will provide targeted policy recommendations to support growth, from intellectual property (IP) reform to infrastructure and investment. Not every country needs to chase AI labs or hyperscale data centers. The point isn't to mimic Silicon Valley. Instead, the countries that win and retain jobs won't be the ones that try to do everything—they'll be the ones that do something well. Even with the right sectors and skills in place, nothing moves without investment. That's where smart incentives come in. Today's investors are seeking predictable, de-risked environments in a world that is increasingly messy and ever-changing. That means: Stable procurement pipelines. India's solar auction system is a standout example of a bright and stable policy. Launched in 2010 under the National Solar Mission, it invited developers to bid competitively for utility-scale projects backed by 25-year power purchase agreements. As a result, costs dropped, investor confidence surged, and solar jobs nearly tripled. According to IRENA, the sector grew from just over 110,000 jobs in 2010 to more than 318,000 by 2023, spanning manufacturing, installation, and maintenance. Targeted subsidies and industrial strategy incentives. In Collie, Western Australia, the state government took a proactive approach to transitioning from coal to clean energy and green manufacturing. A flagship project is the Collie Green Steel Mill—a $400 million facility that will produce low-carbon rebar using renewable-powered electric arc furnaces. It's expected to create 500 construction jobs and 200 long-term roles. To support the project, the government committed: Long-term industrial strategy policy certainty and investor confidence. Even the best incentives fall flat if investors don't believe they'll last. As strategist and investor Taufiq Rahim explores in his new book, Trump 2.5, today's industrial strategies—particularly in the U.S.—are increasingly shaped by short-term political cycles and populist pressures. Investors—and foreign governments eyeing an opening—need to pay close attention to where policy continuity might hold, where it might fracture, and what that means for capital flows. As a case in point, just a few years ago, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act was poised to help catalyze a boom in clean energy investment, with 142,000 renewable energy jobs added in 2023 alone. But that momentum now risks being reversed following the House's passage of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act.' One climate tech founder recently warned that his entire business—built around a $85-per-ton carbon capture credit—could be 'vaporized overnight' if the credit disappears or is diluted, as now seems increasingly possible. As a counterpoint, after years of stagnation, nuclear energy appeared to be making a comeback in the U.S., driven by rising demand, concerns over grid reliability, bipartisan support, and net-zero goals. But with the passage of the House version of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act,' prospects have once again become mixed. That's a challenge—because, like all major energy infrastructure, nuclear projects require coordinated, credible policy that investors can count on for years. The timelines are long, the risks are high, and without lasting policy commitment, capital stays on the sidelines. As nuclear-focused investor Arthur Hyde put it to me recently: 'All energy infrastructure is long-lived. Timelines are a red herring. The real question is who offers credible, coordinated policy over time.' Ultimately, the countries that win the new industrial era won't be the ones with the loudest rhetoric. They'll be the ones with the right industrial strategy that invests in people, places smart bets, and aligns policy incentives with long-term intent. The industrial strategy playbook is there. To those with the discipline to follow it, will go the spoils.
The Herald Scotland
22-05-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Why should fishermen have a veto over our relationship with the EU?
It would also work towards 'an ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen co-operation on the threats we face'. The latter course of action has been driven by external events, notably the Trump presidency. The former, about breaking down trade barriers, has started to be delivered when it would have been easier to back off. Indeed, apart from other considerations, this is a significant set-back to the narrative that the Starmer Government is pandering to the advances of Reform UK. Doing deals with Brussels was scarcely designed to win the approbation of Mr Farage. And sure enough, the cry from that quarter was 'surrender' and 'total capitulation'. However, Farage was not the only party leader to respond with opportunistic sloganising. Far from welcoming rapprochement with the EU (which he is supposed to be desperate to join), our First Minister went into familiar Rev I M Swinney mode to bemoan Scotland being 'an afterthought in the UK's decision-making' while the fishing industry had been 'surrendered'. Read more by Brian Wilson This did rather ignore the facts that, like the rest of the UK, Scottish businesses will export more easily to the EU, Scottish travellers will move more freely, Scottish shoppers will benefit from cheaper food, Scottish youths can look forward to exchange schemes, Scottish musicians will see touring restrictions lifted, and so on. Not perfect of course, but a pretty good start. And utterly different from what went before. Swinney's complaint appeared to have been based entirely on the predictable reaction of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation. On the face of it, this is an unlikely union. The Federation overwhelmingly represents Scotland's wealthiest and most powerful fishing interests and was vociferously pro-Brexit. Swinney, on the other hand, supposedly can't get enough of the EU. Never easily satisfied, the SFF was extremely disgruntled with what Brexit delivered them via Boris Johnson's negotiations – a 10 per cent increase in quota by 2026 to be followed by annual renegotiations. The Starmer deal has not taken anything away, except the pain of going through the same ritual annually. It might reasonably be assumed that Johnson and his Scottish colleagues did their best for the Buchan Brexiters and the fact they had to settle for the deal they got suggests that this will always be an issue on which the EU will hold a firm line. That will be the same next year and the year after. The logic of having given the SFF and its counterparts a veto over progress on the whole range of EU relationships would be that the same veto would kick in annually. That is not a price worth paying and the more you know about the interests that the SFF represents, the less inclination there is to believe their demands are appeasable or their objections should be decisive. Maybe Swinney should be more careful about where his ingrained instincts lead him. If the EU sees fishing rights as a bargaining chip with the UK, how much higher a price would it seek to extract if Scotland ever went knocking at the Brussels door with an application to join? The charge of 'surrender' is a self-inflicted contradiction of which Swinney should be regularly reminded. Keir Starmer with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday (Image: PA) Living in the Western Isles (which are surrounded by 22 per cent of Scotland's inshore waters if we want to get territorial about it), tends to create a different perspective on what the 'Scottish fishing industry' means. In fact, there really is no single industry but a whole range of sectors which, historically, have had deeply conflicting interests. The biggest threat to the west coast has long come from the north-east of Scotland, rather than Spanish or French interlopers. The north-east ports had the capital and catching power with precious little respect for lesser interests. In recent decades, this has been compounded by the market in licences and quotas, leading to the near demise of white and pelagic fishing in many communities. When the UK joined the Common Market, 98 per cent of catches in the Western Isles were in these two categories. That has now been entirely reversed and over 90 per cent by both catch and value come from shellfish. The damage done by Brexit – which the Scottish Fishermen's Federation campaigned so hard for – was to the markets on which the shellfish industry (and also salmon farmers) relied. Unsurprisingly therefore, the EU deal has been welcomed in these communities because it removes barriers to European markets. Meanwhile, to the east, almost half of all Scottish quota is owned by five families while a third of the Scottish catch is landed overseas, mainly in Norway. Neither statistic has been to the benefit of Scotland's fishing communities yet this is the hierarchy which the Scottish Fishermen's Federation exists to lobby for and further entrench. So which side are you on, Mr Swinney? Arguably, additional quota could be used to diversify or revive fishing in places that have seen decline and loss over recent decades. But what has happened? The additional quota secured by the Johnson government and devolved to Edinburgh to allocate has gone straight to those with existing catching power. When this allocation was announced last year, there was a vague reference to 'the longer-term potential for community quota allocation initiatives'. But why not now? If the Scottish Government had the slightest interest in addressing injustices, past and present, within the Scottish fishing industry, there are plenty places to start. Far easier to shout 'surrender' and, as usual, appeal to the politics of grievance. Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.
Telegraph
17-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Reeves is fiddling with Isas while Rome burns
Your country needs you, said Lord Kitchener's infamous recruitment poster for the Great War. Today, your country wants you to risk not your life, but your savings. We live in an age of economic nationalism, with the pendulum swinging decisively away from the globalist trends of recent decades towards a more inward-looking approach to economic management. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Starmer Government wants to marshal more of the nation's savings to the purpose of specifically British investment. Everyone else does it. Most countries channel a much greater proportion of their savings resources into domestic enterprise than we manage, so why should the UK remain the odd one out? I'll tell you why in a moment. But first a little background. As regular readers of this column will know – I have written about it often enough – low levels of investment are a key economic weakness for the UK. Relative to most other major economies, we consume too much and we save and invest too little. We are particularly poor when it comes to investing in our own country, preferring instead the seemingly higher returns offered by overseas markets – especially the US. If Britain is ever to throw off its productivity slough, it needs to be investing a lot more in its future. For the moment, we are stuck in a self-reinforcing doom-loop of decline, where low levels of investment feed into weak productivity growth, which in turn makes the UK an even less attractive place to invest. Frog-marching British savers into investing in UK plc is a key objective for Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, and it comes in two different forms. One is to strong-arm pension funds into committing a defined minimum of their assets to unlisted, UK equity investment. The other is to either cut the amount of cash that can be invested in individual savings accounts (Isas) – or to abolish cash Isas entirely – in the hope that this might force savers to invest in UK equities instead. This second line of attack also has an ulterior motive, in that it would remove at least some part of the tax shelter cash Isas provide, and will therefore mean that more of the interest earned from holding cash will get taxed. Last week brought some progress in the first of these two approaches. Thanks in part to the intermediation of Alastair King, 17 of the City's biggest defined contribution pension providers have been persuaded to commit at least 10pc of their default funds to unlisted investment – of which at least a half will be in UK unlisted securities. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing, with the threat of making it mandatory still hanging like a sword of Damocles above their heads should they fall short. But let's not be curmudgeonly about it. Cajoling companies as big as Aviva and Legal & General to lay aside their concerns over breach of fiduciary duty is a significant achievement. Sadly, it's also hardly transformational. Total pension fund assets within the scope of this new, so-called Mansion House Accord, amount to £252bn – leaving the sums to be devoted to the sort of UK infrastructure, clean energy and business start-up investment the Government wants pursued at 'just' £12.5bn. This is not to be sneezed at. But in the context of total UK business investment of around £300bn annually, barely touches the sides. What's more, the far bigger pool of UK savings in now almost entirely closed final salary pension schemes is left untouched by the new accord. That's in part because these funds are required for a still higher purpose – supporting the national debt. Indeed, these so-called defined benefit pension schemes are far and away the biggest single source of buying in the UK gilts market. Without their demand, the Government would struggle to fund itself at current interest rates. This makes the Treasury particularly wary of meddling in the plethora of liability matching rules and regulations that force final salary pension funds to max out on government debt. It's an unhealthily symbiotic relationship in which the one relies on the other, and in itself goes some way to explaining Britain's shamefully poor investment record. With public indebtedness swelling from around 20pc of national income 30 years ago to 100pc today, private investment has been all but crowded out. The nation's savings have flowed into public debt instead. What is more, in terms of improvement in the nation's productive capacity, we have virtually nothing to show for it. Nearly all the money raised has been flushed down the drain of current consumption. In return, pension funds have received a growing mountain of Treasury IOUs. Liability for pensioner entitlements has in effect been loaded onto future generations of taxpayers. Thanks to higher interest rates, Britain's defined benefit pension schemes mercifully find themselves back in balance once more. It's a God-given opportunity for many of them to start investing in higher return UK equities again. But they need the Government to act to make this happen, and it seems unlikely the Treasury would want to risk such an important source of funding for the UK gilts market by forcing things. There's so much wrong with the pensions and savings market in the UK as it stands that it's hard to know where to start. Getting back to a situation where some 40pc to 50pc of available equity investment goes into domestic equity markets, as occurs in the US and Australia, requires root and branch reform. The voluntary half measures so far announced certainly won't do the trick. They are too timid and too beholden to vested interest – including those of the major savings institutions and the Government itself. Plus, they put the cart before the horse. There's a good reason investors prefer overseas markets to our own, and that's because the UK is an increasingly unattractive place to invest. By whacking up taxes on companies, and by further burdening them with much higher minimum wages and worker protections, the Government has made matters even worse. It's entirely reasonable to expect pension and Isa savers to do more to support the domestic economy given the tax breaks they enjoy. But first there's got to be something worth investing in. State-directed investment is rarely a sound use of money, and it is even less so when the funds are channelled into projects that would otherwise struggle to attract commercial backing. Until the UK investment environment as a whole improves, initiatives such as the Mansion House Accord amount to just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Starmer has one last chance to save dying British industry
Britain's whisky exports to India will face significantly lower tariffs. And at least some cars and steel can be sold to the US at a lower rate of tax than other countries are paying. With the India and US trade deals signed over the last few days this should have been a great week for British exporters. But there is just one catch. None of it will make any difference unless we have a more competitive industrial base. The Government is meant to be finalising its strategy for manufacturing, including most crucially a plan to bring down energy costs. But, in reality, the trade deals give the Starmer Government one last chance to save Britain's dying industry – because very soon it will have disappeared completely. British exporters should be feeling a lot more confident this week. The deal with India will give them far better access to what is already the world's fourth-largest economy, and, at least by some projections, may well be the largest by the middle of the century. The deal with Donald Trump was far more modest, and only scaled back some of the 'liberation day' tariffs he imposed on April 2. Still, it lifted the levies on the steel and car industries, and it gave the UK better terms for trading with what remains the world's largest market than any of our European rivals. Both of them were significant victories. Here's the problem, however. You can't sell more spirits into India if you can't get planning permission to expand the distillery or if the workers are too expensive to employ. Likewise, you can't sell more steel into the US if plants are closing down because energy costs are twice the American levels, and you can't ship more cars across the Atlantic if net zero regulations have closed down the factories that used to make them. Even the best trade deal in the world can't help you sell products you don't make any more. The real problem is that our industrial base has been in rapid decline. The figures are sobering. The UK has slipped out of the top 10 manufacturing countries in the world, and now ranks only 12th, behind Italy and Mexico. There has been a 38pc fall in chemicals output since 2021, electrical equipment is down by 50pc, and even pharmaceutical production, which is meant to be one of our strongest industries, has been declining at an annual 6pc rate for the last decade. Only on Friday, we learnt that one of the UK's largest chemicals plants, the Saudi owned Olefins 6 facility in Teesside, is now at risk of closure as well. A trade deal is not going to change any of those trends. It won't bring down crippling energy costs that have driven industrial prices in the UK to some of the highest levels in the world. It won't bring down the employment taxes that have already been pushed up by this Government to levels that have made it too expensive to employ people, nor will they fix a minimum wage that has reached levels where it has destroyed jobs, or employment laws that make it too risky to hire anyone. And they won't change crushing regulations that make it virtually impossible to expand a factory even if demand increases, or impose crippling targets that double the cost and triple the time it takes to expand. All of those have made the UK one of the hardest, most expensive countries in the world to make things. In the face of so many obstacles, it is hardly surprising that so many companies are giving up, such as at the huge Grangemouth crude processing plant that stopped production last month. The Government is meant to be finally unveiling its industrial strategy over the summer with sectors such as defence, life sciences and advanced manufacturing singled out for extra help. Intriguingly, the advance briefings suggest that it will include some ideas for tackling sky-high energy costs, although it is hard to see how that will be possible without watering down the commitment to be a 'world leader' on hitting net zero or allowing new developments in the North Sea, or even – gasp! – taking another look at how safe fracking has proved in the US and Canada. If it just involves subsidies, or some waffle about GB Energy, that is not going to help anyone. The industrial strategy when it finally arrives needs to target sectors with the potential for high growth, but most crucially it needs to start taking down the barriers that have made life so tough for manufacturing. The trade deals should provide the perfect opportunity for the government to be a lot bolder and more radical than it could have been only a few weeks ago. It now needs to summon up the political will to start making some changes. After this week, the global market is more open to British manufacturers than it has been for a generation or more, and certainly more open than it would be if we were still trapped within the European Union. If we can build on them, access to the US and India, and many other countries as well, can improve over the next few years. But you can't export stuff you have lost the capacity to make. In reality, the trade deals will only work if they are accompanied by radical domestic policies to improve our competitiveness. With its industrial strategy set to be unveiled over the summer, and with trade deals starting to get signed, the Starmer government has one last chance to rescue an industrial base that is in steep decline. If it does not seize the moment – and depressingly there is very little evidence that it will – then very soon it will be too late to rescue what little of our manufacturing industry remains. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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