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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 30 June 2025

Debate

UK Modern Industrial Strategy

Contribution

My Lords, in its introduction, the industrial strategy says that “we live in a world dominated by the rise of superstar firms, whose success spills over to the wider economy”. It seems that the Government are adopting a trickle-down theory of business, but is this not assuming a future that looks like the past two decades? It has been an era of cheap, abundant financing for firms that have often burned through enormous sums of money—money used to force competitors out of business and to buy out genuine innovators and swallow them up, or squash them, not to deliver genuinely productive, useful, substantive products and services. This is the idea of the unicorn: a biased picture of entrepreneurship that favours valuation over value creation. This is the model that has given us the massively unequal, deeply unstable society we have today. Surely, we cannot keep going the way we are. It has got us to the disastrous point we are now at.

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