Putting industrial policy in its place: Securonomics and reindustrialisation between defence, digital and decarbonisation

In the UK and across Europe people who feel that they and their communities have been left out of security and prosperity are biting back at the ballot box. A string of far right successes on the continent and now the rise of Reform in the UK can in part be understood as the retaliation against a ‘mainstream’ politics which has consistently over decades, failed specific – often post industrial – communities. Tackling these deep rooted inequalities is a key mission for for Social Democrats, but as we try (and often fail) to manage the fallout of the last industrial transition we find ourselves in the foothills of a new one. The climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing digitisation and automation of work – all challenges that will reshape our economies. All trends with winners and losers. How do we avoid a double-depression? Where communities who lost out in the last transition are, inevitably weakened by this, passed over for the next? Industrial policy is back in vogue in the West after a long period of seeming irrelevance. Labour has placed it’s plans for an industrial strategy at the centre of its economic agenda.

This paper, which kicks off a programme of work across Europe, is a survey of the power and potential of such policy to redress the economic inequalities of the past, and head off the inequalities of the future. It explores how governments in the UK and EU are managing the big national and international trends at the level of places, and using industrial policy to put those places back into prosperity and pride again.