Boris Johnson can deliver a bolder economic vision for Britain
Brexit Britain is at an impasse. Half-in, half-out, with our politics gridlocked, we are now in serious danger of undermining our traditional attractiveness as a magnet for global investment.
This week’s quarterly survey of FTSE CFOs by Deloitte shows that 83 per cent expect the UK’s economic prospects to worsen as a result of Brexit – the highest since 2016. If Her Majesty’s Government was a public company, our share price would be in freefall while the board is fighting, staff quitting, suppliers renegotiating and customers protesting.
This is not a basis for the global investor confidence that we urgently need. With big post-Crash debts, a stubborn structural deficit and falling rates of investor confidence, we cannot afford this political crisis to become an economic one. We need a new leader who can restore confidence in both our short-term and longer-term economic prospects and see off the rising threat of Corbyn’s anti-capitalist “new left” with an impassioned defence of the virtues of enterprise and a bold programme for reform and insurgent innovation.
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If the government was a company, Brexit is like a management buy out – but without any clarity on the new company’s business plan. As in business, being clear on the goal makes the mechanism of the Withdrawal Agreement easier to agree. What we lack isn’t managerialism, but a bold vision, and the Brexit credibility and positive energy to pursue it.
That’s why it has to be Boris.
After three years of lamentable technocratic tinkering and anti-business virtue signalling from No 10, we urgently need to unleash a renaissance of UK enterprise and innovation. We have the science and innovation, the entrepreneurial culture, the City’s expertise, and the global reach to be a genuine “Innovation Nation”.
So what’s holding us back?
Brexit is a once-in-a-generation chance to move from a European service economy to become a truly global innovation economy. By harnessing our science prowess to help sustainable development in the fastest-growing emerging markets, we could unlock a new 20-year cycle of strong growth, inward investment and export-led trade to grow our way out of debt.
While Europe is growing at a fragile 1.5 per cent and creating too few jobs, the developing nations in Africa and Asia – like the Philippines where I was UK trade envoy – are growing at seven-eight per cent. As these economies go through the agricultural and industrial revolutions in the next 30 years that we pioneered over 300 years, they represent huge markets for UK innovation, especially in agri-tech, clean-tech and med-tech (the broader “life sciences”) to feed, fuel, and heal their burgeoning populations.
As I set out in my 2014 Fresh Start report “How EU anti-science regulations risk UK Life Science”, the EU’s ban on agri-tech genetics and its regulations on clinical trials and data are deeply unenlightened.
In the next 30 years, as the world population rises to nine billion, we have to double food production on the same land area using half as much water. That’s a global Grand Challenge. It’s also a massive opportunity for the UK’s world class agritech sector. That’s why, as minister for life science, I launched the UK agri-tech industrial strategy. The same demand curve applies in medicine and energy.
In helping developing nations move out of subsistence, we help create markets for our civil engineering, construction, retail, legal, professional and advisory services, and all other services of a developing economy. As we showed in linking our life science, aid and armed forces to prevent global pandemics of Zika and Ebola, our science is also key to our global soft power.
Imagine the effect of a much deeper alignment of UK innovation with the emerging economies, helping us move from a European service economy to a global innovation economy. By recasting our place in a post-Brexit world as a leader in creating the industries, jobs and innovations of tomorrow, we can make Britain a twenty-first century science and innovation superpower.
Take genomics – and the appliance of the science of genetics – now driving a transformation of medicine and agriculture in a new “bio-economy” with vast global growth.
The UK’s groundbreaking NHS genomics programme that we launched in the life science industrial strategy has triggered a new global race – evidenced by China’s investment in copying our groundbreaking programme but at a much bigger scale.
So why don’t we launch a Commonwealth Genomics Programme to use the global reach of the Commonwealth network to pool our collective resources and achieve life-saving breakthroughs in tropical diseases like malaria and other killer infection?
So how do we deliver this new economic model of global growth?
- Launch a bio-economy industrial strategy to harness the economic potential of bioscience in agri-tech, clean-tech and med-tech.
- Raise UK research and development funding to three per cent of GDP, and incentivise R&D funding which rewards the really ground-breaking blue-sky breakthroughs.
- Launch a Commonwealth Genomics Programme to use the global reach of the Commonwealth network to help lead global vaccines and biosecurity.
- Stop the brain drain of UK tech companies to the US to access finance by expanding the successful bio-catalyst model of private public funding, capital gains tax relief for long-term UK tech investors, and by launching UK Technology and Global Development Isas.
- Commit to innovative public sector procurement to make the UK an early adopter of innovation.
- Open up tech transfer to emerging markets with new development partnerships in which we offer a handful of nations in the world, where we have good links, a New Deal: doubling the aid, doubling the security, and tenfold increasing the trade.
Brexit demands these bold ideas – 17m people voted against the status quo. Science and technology are the key to our future prosperity, security and sustainability.
We have the chance to put innovation at the centre of our post-Brexit economy to unlock a new golden era of UK science for global benefit. Done correctly, this can inspire both the 52 per cent and the 48 per cent – as well as a new generation who worry that Brexit is a moment of xenophobic Ukip-flavoured isolationism.
Brexit does not have to diminish Britain’s role in the world. We can create new opportunities for a new generation. Let us seize the opportunity for the sake of our nation, our planet and future generations.
But this won’t just happen of its own accord. It needs real political leadership. To achieve this innovation nation vision, we urgently need a science & innovation minister at cabinet level with a remit to lead it across government.
But above all, to break the political deadlock, inspire and unlock economic confidence, and signal a real commitment to put this at the front of a serious programme of national renewal, we need a Prime Minister in the mould of a bold reforming chairman of UK plc, with a vision and an ability to inspire and disrupt old siloed thinking, and empower a new team.
We can’t simply deliver Brexit, we must go beyond Brexit and make this the moment we renew our national mission.
As former trade envoy and business minister, I led a trade delegation with Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary, and worked with him as mayor of London creating MedCity and attracting major inward investment to put London on the global map as a biomedical engine. I’ve been through all proposals I touch on in this piece with Boris. He gets it. He has reassured me that he will do it.
I’m backing Boris as the PM for science, innovation and growth, because he shares wholeheartedly my belief that it’s time for a bold programme of national economic renewal to unleash the UK as a global innovation nation, to inspire both our own citizens and the confidence of the global investors and markets we so urgently need.
Main image credit: Stefan Rousseau / WPA Pool / Getty Images