What policy approach can support the advance of post-Brexit Britain both nationally, especially in our northern regions, and globally?

Contrarily, my starting point is Asia. Vietnam, a fertile coastally populated medium-sized nation near to the size of the UK, has a growth rate of 7.5%. Vietnam is changing fast, with expanding exports of food and construction materials, while docks and roads are expanding and improving to cope.

The nation’s family structures and lifestyles are changing too. Vietnam has endless rows of street ‘shophouses’: houses with a shop on the ground floor displaying arrays of goods open to the street. Above the shop lives the extended family. However, many younger family members now work in new factories, both the family cluster and communal shophouse living are slowly disappearing; the young prefer Western-style independent living.

What’s this got to do with the UK? Well, we have been through such changes too; the average rural family in England lived in a barn-style hovel with fifteen others in 1750. In 1900, around ten families shared each slum in Manchester, Glasgow and Newcastle. Our wet weather forced a life indoors with alcohol for succour, but we also had a plethora of small retail outlets – the nation of shopkeepers emerged. Soon enough, higher wages allowed places like Bacup, Halifax, Huddersfield – usually with their own industrial specialisms – to construct new tracts of two-up, two-down homes for working people (tenements in the cities) with nearby corner shops and high streets. The streetscapes of pre-suburban Britain were formed.

Vietnam, and Asia generally, is collapsing the changes that we saw over 200 years into only a few decades; their peoples are eager for it, changing and learning fast. Such is the luck of new developing economies building industrialisation into their way of life – new knowledge is sponged up. But the UK’s ‘Red Wall’ areas have seen change stall in their world; they see the walls and chimneys and streetscape of a coal-driven Victorian age around them, interrupted with boxy industrial distribution centres selling goods from – er – Asia, and no productive knowledge needed, which offends. They want economic improvement as much as the Vietnamese do, but feel cheated of it.

Are we fated to a dismal deindustrialised UK? My answer is emphatically no, if we recognise the role of dispersed knowledge and how that can be bolstered by infrastructural and social change in development. We need to recognise that to improve our economic lot faster, we have to change our surroundings faster in line with local understanding. That takes two things; bulldozers – and the freedom to bulldoze. If we want a 7.5% growth rate (and we really do need that post-dovid) we need to start knocking things down.

Which in turn brings us to central planning, and the proclivity of UK Central to assume it is the only way to advance development. Actually, it gets in the way, everywhere and at all times: because it does not have localised knowledge, it adopts precautions against risk. It then chooses corporate interests to take over how change takes place, with over-layers of precautionary planning, slowing it down drastically.

Central planners view change through the lens of a university education and a high-minded view of technology or the equality and a social justice identitarian agenda that defines how social needs ‘should’ to be met. The ideas and social mores of ‘Workington Man’ are far too often met with a snort of disdain or a condescending disregard, so discarding the very asset that change requires – local knowledge about how a locality can be improved in line with local interests. 

We are not all academically inclined, nor mathematically literate, or verbosely articulate; most citizens of any nation are better with their hands than their brains. Production staff matter as much as thinking people. We need the diverse eco-system of factories, distribution trades, artisans and non-technical service skills to add value for the wages we spend on other retail and hospitality trades. And we need to recognise that 99% of all firms are small – large corporates are a rarity.

To make that eco-system fully fertile we have to find a way to release barriers to that 99% being curious and creative; speculating to accumulate. We have to allow power over change to be localised radically. The key is to localise the ownership of change and pricing powers.

This means allowing unused buildings to have a change of use or be knocked down. Give the right to develop to a highly localised area, down to street level, including the right to bulldoze. Property rights need to be given to group interests, not the central state’s conflicting objectives.

It means that constraining regulation should be localised as much as possible, made subject to sunset clauses, and allowing regulatory diversity. For example, we are promised an internet of things, but check out the layer cake of obstructions involved in putting an antenna on a building in the UK, or fastening a sensor to a street sign. A liberal rule-based licence system for players smaller than the statutory utilities (those wonderful people who bully you to have a useless and hugely costly ‘smart’ electricity meters) could presume progress as advantageous.

This means allowing new main roads, link roads and streetscapes to be built. Teesside used to laud the fact you could travel round the area at ‘a mile a minute’. No longer, and it’s holding up productive industry in a low-income area. South of London the roads’ infrastructure is pathetic, polluting and packed with traffic full of unproductive people. Worthing has approved, then reversed, its planning consent on the A27 several times, generating nothing useful other than planning blight and an endless fight between locals and central government. 

Roads Trusts providing priced transport routes, especially if owned by those local to throughways, would allow people to balance the intrusion of traffic against trust dividend revenues.

Releasing productivity creativity by harnessing the millions of able enterprising minds is key to the fast change we need in the UK; but those minds have to be franchised by UK Central divesting its power over property, prices and the discovery process that allows us to engineer change through localised knowledge. 

I am not enthused by plans to build huge battery plants, or force rural broadband trench digging, or spend millions on exotic ‘green’ technology. 

Infrastructure engineering does not offer a plug-and-play outcome certainty. In particular, using state-owned corporatist methods does not advance the rate of commercialised end-to-end innovation; rather it introduces the treacle of loss-inducing incentives that favour coffee breaks and meetings over early starts and pushing product out of the door. It is worth remembering that our ship-building, automotive, aerospace, brewing and other large-player industries all started with multiple small players.

Corporates emerge through gradual agglomeration based on accounting considerations. That accounting, in turn, makes corporates slow adapters, letting other new players find niches that then grow. We need to evolve the latter.

There are those who demur, claiming that the internet, digital telephony, electronics and other new industries were all seeded by the state through the knowledge within its research agencies and universities. That’s a heroic view of technical change. Yes, Berners-Lee proposed and developed a hypertext protocol for common data sharing, but he no more invented ‘the internet’ than Cassius the Roman wheeled-chariot maker invented the Lamborghini. Innovation takes time, and in today’s world the integration of product and channel as a business system that repeatedly adds value is a multi-disciplinary, multi-layered effort by a network of nested sub-contracting relationships from design inspiration through to sales innovation.

Britain is blessed with two sets of institutions that do help us as sovereign and valuable knowledge assets: our universities and the City. Both, however, are pretty much useless at putting together the commercial networks above. They have no more idea what the next ‘cutting-edge growth technology’ might be than the rest of us. Rather, they feed those networks with new ideas and the finance to test them. 

Diversity and anarchy are UK cultural traditions in engineering our luck. We are unlike the Continental Europeans in this; forcing collegiate thinking and hierarchical managerialism with its machine-like adherence to goals into our local areas and industries is a mistake. Post Brexit, we need to align our stubborn creativity and localised diversity with our policy methods, to embrace a lot of rapid change, and quite a bit of mess through creative destruction – but directed by local people.

Britain changed dramatically when textile production was mechanised, when steam power advanced, when cholera and smallpox were conquered, when the internal combustion engine became powerful, when sepsis and pathogenic bacteria were tamed, and when radio communications advanced; now it is changing again, as digitisation evolves through telematic artificial ‘intelligence’.

None of us have any idea if the next revolution will be in mechanical energy, biochemistry, electronic data or some other area of technical insight. It might only be in automated human services: nail bars, garden tending or personal training. What we do know is that it is not ‘the state’ or ‘society’ that can, in some obscure personified way, become collectively creative; we all know politicians and bureaucrats make many more bad than good calls as they have discretion without real knowledge. Allowing people the freedom to take back control at the level where that freedom over value-adding property and ideas can be harnessed should be the foundation of all policy.

This article was previously published by Brexit-Watch.org.