There's a certain rub to this plan

Not the specific plan for semiconductors, but the plan to have a plan about a business sector such as semiconductors:

Smarter, more precise policy can benefit our own chip industry much more, as would being mindful of the Chinese acquiring vital IP for peanuts.

Smarter policy would be a benefit, of course it would. But that runs into a problem. How do we gain smarter policy?

Biden’s Chips Act overwhelmingly favours the big SoCs, which very much reflects the lobbying behind it.

Any policy which depends upon politics for either design or implementation is going to be subject to political lobbying. Which is why such a plan will reflect the weight of political power in any particular direction. Not, in fact, what is sensible or smart to do about the problem under discussion.

This next part should probably be read to the sound of massed ranks of own trumpet blowing. But one of us here is one of the half dozen or so global experts on one of the rare earths. Used to deal with more than 50% of the global market in fact. The British government has a critical minerals policy it has been working on for some time - which does indeed include the rare earths. That expert here at the ASI has even written a whole book on the subject. And yet in that multi-year process of devising that national plan on the subject where this global expert could offer some insight there’s been not the one single contact from those devising the plan. It’s not as if they’d have to look far - we are, after all, only a couple of hundred yards from Whitehall.

Yes, there’s an element of “But why didn’t they ask us? Aren’t we important or famous enough?” here for those who would like to impute such. And yet it is something of a failure all the same. If we had been asked our advice would have been to spend a couple of million on certain basic research, not the many millions on subsidising a factory using old technology but that’s almost by the by. A planning process that doesn’t use expertise available on the doorstep is a less than exhaustive planning process, isn’t it?

Or, as we might also put it. Planning through the political process ends up being those elected because they’re good at kissing babies doing whatever they’re told by those who shout loudest at them. This isn’t a good way of building plans - nor of running the country.