Britain could be a sci-tech superpower – if the Treasury stopped holding it back | Will Hutton

The UK has the research base, the startups, the venture capitalists, but its presence in the global market is pitiful. The chancellor must step in

Just how bad is the economy? The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, warns that hard choices on tax, spending and borrowing need to be made on 30 October when she delivers the first Labour budget since 2010, so poor is the economic legacy. Phooey, respond those still standing in the shredded Tory party. The economy, clipping along at a growth rate north of 2% this year, is in good shape; it is her giving in to her union paymasters" that is the problem. She responds that the crisis in public sector pay had to be confronted.

Yet widen the economic lens to the condition of corporate Britain and the scale of its presence in new technologies and the Tory bequest is unambiguously bad. Britain simply does not possess a critical mass of ambitious, sizeable-growth companies at the frontiers of technology capable of leading any private sector investment or growth boom.