Building Back Worse
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is clearly happy for the state to play a larger role in the economy. And yet, by scrapping a perfectly sensible industrial strategy for no good reason, it has all but ensured that the country’s economic problems will remain unsolved.
LONDON – The term “industrial strategy” has a turbulent history. After being embraced in the United Kingdom by the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, it was rejected by Margaret Thatcher and subsequent prime ministers on the (dubious) grounds that government is inherently wasteful and inefficient.