Sir John Cowperthwaite was sent out to aid in running Hong Kong after WWII. So the story goes it took him some months to get there and found it thriving without his guiding hand. Therefore, he concluded, his job was to make sure this continued by not allowing anyone else to try to be that guiding hand.

Asked what the key thing poor countries should do, Cowperthwaite once remarked, "They should abolish the office of national statistics." He refused to collect all but the most superficial statistics, believing they led the state to fiddle about remedying perceived ills, thus hindering the working of the market. This caused consternation: a Whitehall delegation was sent to find out why employment statistics were not being collected, but the financial secretary literally sent them back on the next plane.

So it is said, he refused even to collect, or to allow to be collected, GDP statistics on the grounds that “some damn fool will only want to do something with them.”

Hong Kong remained, until just very recently, the most classically liberal free market economy in the world and thereby became one of the richest.

Which brings us to the British computer chip industry:

Britain’s first-class chip industry must be protected

Indeed so.

This century, Bath and Bristol, the latter home to Inmos’s design team, have spawned successful conventional microprocessor companies such as Picochip (sold to Intel) and the latest tech Unicorn, Graphcore. British chip companies have had to be resourceful – our most successful today is Arm, which was unable to secure funding for a fab, so instead pioneered the model of licensing its designs.

Today a new and exciting nationwide ecosystem is emerging in the new field of advanced, post-Silicon electronics, components with science fiction-like properties, but an awful name: “compound semiconductors”.

.....

For commercial success, you need three things near each other, says Dr Andy Sellars of the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult: researchers, the chip design teams, and the fabs, and Britain has all three.

“We’re world leaders in this niche,” says Rupert Baines, formerly chief executive of the British chip company UltraSoc, which made a successful exit when it was acquired by Bosch for £150m last year.

...

So why is SW1 so oblivious to it?

The contrast is made between this current success, where SW1 does not just leave the industry to its own devices (sorry) with a policy of benign neglect but one of active ignorance, and the failures such as Inmos when government was more deeply involved in subsidy and direction.

Which leads to the obvious point that protecting the industry should be done by the Cowperthwaite method. It is the absence of government or political involvement that has led to the thriving and world class sector. The task is therefore to continue the policy of not allowing a guiding hand.

Policy becomes obvious. Not that we’re supposed to use quite such incendiary language and we do mean this in a metaphorical sense only, but protecting Britain’s chip industry is best done by shooting any politician who even so much as expresses an interest let alone has suggestions for policy.