I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20^th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left).  In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests some lessons that every country wishing to harness the “white heat of modernization” (a famous term incorrectly ascribed to Prime Minster Harold Wilson) for the purpose of economic growth.

Edgerton has very little time for the notion that the reason for British decline after 1950 was largely because stuffy old finance capitalism and hidebound Tory governments weren’t making the economy more “dynamic” by investing in science and research.  In fact, this was an era of major government investment in scientific/technological projects.  The Advance Gas-Cooled Reactor was developed, and nuclear energy was substantially adopted.  Fuel cells, hovercraft, and at least half (the “better half”, as Margaret Thatcher used to say) of Concorde were all developed wholly or partly in government laboratories and/or developed through government funding.   And yet almost none of this resulted in any viable products for exports. 

Well, I can hear some of you say, that’s hardly surprising since it’s not applied but basic science which is the wellspring of innovation.  And we all know the UK was terrible at Science, right?  Oxbridge all full of humanists, and so on?  That might have been true a century earlier, but in the mid-century, British science was at its peak. True, its scientists were mostly shut out of the Physics Nobel after 1950 (Cockroft and Walton won in 1951 but after that it was pretty much all Americans and Germans), but got their fair share of awards in Medicine (wins or partial wins in ’53, ’60, ’62 and ’63) and were dominant in Chemistry (winners or co-winners in ’52, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’62, ’64 and ’69).  This was clearly not a country that was hurting for basic science.

Still, this did not mean much for the economy.  Growth rates were low and stayed low for most of the 1970s and 1980s.  There was no technological flip, spillovers were minor to non-existent, and by the early 80s the massively unemployed UK was widely viewed as the sick man of Europe. 

It’s not as though there were no scientific or technological breakthroughs.  Fibre-optic cable was developed in the UK in the 1960s at around the time scientists at the National Physical Laboratory invented packet-switching.  In the medical field, CT scanners, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the artificial hip were all developed in the UK. And yet if we look today at top-level knowledge-intensive industry in the UK, what we mostly see is pharmaceuticals and – in terms of large corporations – Vodaphone. 

Now, one can explain this result in a variety of ways, including disruptive and increasingly Bolshevik trade unions (if you are on the right) or the abandonment of Keynesian demand-management for the voodoo economics of Friedmanite monetary policy (if you are on the left).  It doesn’t really matter.  The point is, techno/scientific-nationalism on its own simply could not overcome whatever other head winds were beating down on the economy.  Massive investment in R&D, even when it comes well-balanced between public and private sources, and between basic and applied, on its own, solves nothing.

The flip side to all of this is that Edgerton is better at debunking historical consensus than he is at proposing alternative theories, so it’s not entirely clear what he thinks the missing ingredients were.  If I had to propose a couple of my own, it would be: the rate of new enterprise formation (which seems to have been relatively low), a lack of skilled employees to expand production (universities did not really “massify” until about the mid-70s or even early 1980s) and the fact that at the moment when they might have started exporting, they were still shut out of the European Community because of de Gaulle’s veto. 

Obviously, that’s just speculation on my part.  But the fact remains: post-war Britain is a spectacular real-life warning that innovation policies which simply aim to increase the supply of science and technology (i.e. the exact policy that Universities Canada and the U15 have been pushing for the last couple of decades) are deeply inadequate.  Whatever the secret sauce is, it’s not solely that.