Industrial strategy, devolution and public investment. Stian Westlake offers up a fairy tale. of 2017. Share: When Britain voted to leave the European Union, few people expected it would result in the UK becoming more like Germany, the country that runs the European show. But that’s what ended up happening, and it was in 2017 that the process really began. Industrial strategy was the first step. Theresa May’s government decided that Britain’s ever-increasing trade deficit was a luxury that the UK, as an independent nation, could no longer afford. Already in 2016 Philip Hammond had begun to deviate from decades of Treasury orthodoxy by announcing £23 billion of investments into infrastructure, skills and research. Over the course of 2017, the UK proved the Treasury view wrong by investing effectively in downstream R&D, identifying its real industrial strengths, focusing big government budgets like health and energy on innovation, and sowing the seeds for a revival of productive bu...