Industrial Strategy: May government needs to match it's words with public investment if it wants to unlock missions potential

When Theresa May took over the leadership of the Conservative Party, she heralded a change of approach. There has been a lot of talk of government being willing to get more involved - on May's part, expressed in her insistence on restoring the Unionist part of the party's legacy, including invoking Joseph Chamberlain and a more activist government.

The issuing of an industrial strategy was seen as a statement of intent - an act of intervention that broke with the pro-business, laissez faire brand of 'liberal conservatism' of her predecessors David Cameron and George Osborne.

However, follow through has been limited. So too has money. Once published, the government's strategy looked less about shaping markets and supporting innovators, and more about propping up Britain's failing industries with deals and deregulation.

Theresa May's latest step was to reference the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IPPR), who along with it's director Mariana Mazzucato have been pressing hard for a reshaping of how we understand the role of government in innovation. But her warm words toward the potential of strategic missions will mean nothing without the funding to match.

Mazzucato's work has argued, the state can be the risk taking pioneer - a role expected of the private sector, but which it is never willing to fulfil. By funding R&D, by offering long term, stable public investment, government can open up and shape entirely new markets.

But it can't do this without money - at either end. Projects need investment and support to be there from the start and need the private sector not be able to simply walk away with unlimited potential earnings at the end, with no restitution for the public role. Big ideas should fund new big ideas.

Theresa May's government, however, has yet to be willing to match big words with big funding. Today's speech was no different. There was a lot of praise for public institutions that engage in research, but little mention for how they have been strangled of funding.

May set out her four missions - within four 'grand challenges' facing Britain taken from the Industrial Strategy - and praised the potential of missions to drive innovation forward. But that was the extent of it.

Both the IPPR and the thinktank OECD have argued that increased public investment, and the infrastructure to implement it like a National Investment Bank, is a golden opportunity that the UK is not taking advantage of - despite Britain investing well below 3% of GDP.

Without funding, potential will remain unexplored. Mission statements represent step one in a coordinated approach. The Prime Minister herself acknowledged that progress is born from collaboration and cooperation. There needs to be a lot more of it, and something more: coordination.

Theresa May is committing to the big visions/big speeches aspect of the call for strategic thinking. Will the government wake up and start to put in place the rest of the infrastructure needed to maximise the potential that can be unlocked by long term strategic thinking?

Resolution deposit windfall proposals: Half measures better than nothing, but we must tackle underlying problems in housing

Resolution Foundation package of proposals include a £10,000 windfall at 25, to be used to put down a deposit on a home, a housing policy that only works around current problems.

Last week, the Resolution Foundation proposed a package of measures to restore a sense of fairness in the social contract between those either side of the 'Generational Divide'. It contains some headline grabbing polict proposals.

Resolution's package of measures was headlined by a £10,000 windfall for all citizens at 25 - a policy once proposed by Thomas Paine as a universal inheritance. It was accompanied by a call for a rise in National Insurance payments by pensioners to raise funds for the NHS and reforming council tax.

The Resolution Foundation is a think tank, aiming to improve the standard of living of low income families. It's current chair is former Conservative Minister David Willetts and it's Director is Torsten Bell, a former advisor to Ed Miliband.

As a thinker, Willetts has been the quiet man behind the New Right and the turning of conservatism towards fiscal restraint,  outsourcing and privatisation, favouring markets, with a shell of traditonalism surrounding certain social liberalisms.

In essence: the dominant current within the broader theme of Neoliberalism in the West. And, it is important to note, the Third Way of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

It's worth noting this because Resolution's proposals come off as very New Labour - seeking a neoliberal way around problems like inequality, accepting them as part of the system and turning them to an advantage, rather than actively fixing them.

Case in point. We live in a time in which house prices are high, prohibitively so, while job security and pay are low. A tax-funded windfall, to help young people put down deposits, would be welcomed. But it pastes over problems with redistribution.

That was New Labour's Third Way. From working tax credits to Private Finance Initiatives, Gordon Brown responded to an imbalanced economy and unequal accumulations of wealth, by taxing them to fund social programmes.

Now. This is not to discredit or tear down the work done by Brown. And yet, exploiting those who are exploiting our society, in order to repair the damage their exploitation does, is a maddening circle.

Laurie Macfarlane, economics editor at Open Democracy who has written extensively on the housing crisis, has taken the same view - casting doubt on the benefit of pouring money into the property market to keep it afloat, arguing that "the property ladder model... was a one-off that can't be repeated."

Even half measures and excuses are not to sniffed at. They could help a lot of people facing lean times. But we shouldn't bet the house on them. We can't keep looking to work arounds, avoiding fixing the underlying things that are actually wrong.