In her 2016 Birmingham speech in the campaign for the Conservative Party’s leadership, Theresa May stated that she wanted to see a ‘proper industrial strategy to get the whole economy firing’. Her enthusiasm reflected a renewed international interest in industrial strategies following the 2008 global economic crisis, despite the perceived policy failures of strategies to ‘pick winners’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Although May’s Government was distracted to the point of near-paralysis by the ongoing crisis of Brexit, it was, after some delay, able to produce an industrial strategy which was laid out in a much-anticipated White Paper published in November 2017 (HM Government, 2017). The strategy’s framework has four cross-cutting themes referred to as ‘grand challenges’ (AI and the data economy, the future of mobility, clean growth, and the aging society) and five foundations of productivity (ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places). Four years after May’s speech, with a different Prime Minister and an economy now suffering from the double-insecurity of approaching Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, the industrial strategy remains an important reference-point for many (Taylor, 2020). This is despite the strategy receiving apparently lukewarm support from the current Government (Westwood, 2020).

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地方产业战略特刊

特蕾莎·梅（Theresa May）在2016年伯明翰（Birmingham）保守党领导人竞选活动中的讲话中表示，她希望看到一种“适当的工业战略，以刺激整个经济”。她的热情反映了2008年全球经济危机后国际上对工业战略的重新兴趣，尽管在1960年代和1970年代人们认为“选拔获胜者”的战略在政策上是失败的。尽管梅的政府因持续的英国退欧危机而分散到几乎瘫痪的地步，但经过一段时间的拖延，它能够制定一项工业战略，该战略已在备受期待的2017年11月发布的白皮书中提出（英国政府，2017）。该策略的框架有四个跨领域主题，被称为“巨大挑战”（人工智能和数据经济，移动性的未来，清洁增长，和老龄化社会）以及生产力的五个基础（理念，人员，基础设施，商业环境和场所）。在5月的演讲之后的四年中，由于另一位总理和一个经济体正面临接近英国退欧和Covid-19大流行的双重不安全感，产业战略仍然是许多人的重要参考点（Taylor，2020）。尽管该战略得到了现政府的明显冷淡支持（Westwood，2020年）。