There are five elements to the manifesto – extracted from a consultation amongst members of the institutions:
- Define and clearly articulate a bold, global and ambitious vision for the UK
- Focus the education and skills system on fully unlocking UK talent and potential
- Support innovation
- The benefits of engineering, in terms of economic growth and social advancement must be spread across the UK
- Prioritise world class supporting infrastructure
To be honest, none of these calls should be unfamiliar to UK politicians and you would be surprised if they haven’t come across point 2 by now. But reading something and doing something about it are two different things.
To be fair to the outgoing Government, it has addressed point 1 with its Industrial Strategy. But the next administration – likely to be Conservative, according to the polls – will be preoccupied with Brexit and you wonder how high industrial strategy will come up its agenda post Election.
It’s point 4 where things start to fall down. We don’t highlight the benefits of engineering to anything like we should and you might conclude that making anything but money in the UK is regarded as somewhat tacky. When the benefits of engineering are expounded, it’s often on an engineer to engineer basis. And on the odd occasion when engineering is addressed by the mainstream media, it’s often covered from a ‘sunset industry’ perspective.
Intel made a great success of the ‘Intel Inside’ branding. I’ve said before we should have an ‘electronics inside’ campaign, but perhaps that should be extended to ‘engineering inside’.
