How easy is it to change the focus of an entire economy?

If I’m honest, I can’t remember a great deal of what I learned when I was a student at Newcastle University in the early noughties. It can’t have been a complete waste of time, though: I came out with a degree in politics, and wrote a weekly column for the student paper; these days I occasionally get paid to write columns about politics. So I must have done something right. 

One thing I do remember, however, was an essay about how certain countries’ economies had been ravaged by an overreliance on cash-crop farming. They dedicated too much time, money and land to farm the product that would be most attractive as an export product without enough consideration for local needs. If the crop failed, exports plummeted, and there was nothing else to sell, or eat. 

The conclusion was simple: diversify your economy. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. 

This is an over-simplification, of course, and my memory is sketchy. But the essay came back into my mind after I attended two events recently at which universities minister Sam Gyimah was speaking: the Huawei European Academic Salon in London, hosted by Times Higher Education; and the opening of the Schr?dinger building at the Oxford Science Park. 

At both events, Gyimah extolled the virtues of the technology industry and the importance of innovation to the future of the UK economy—an economy that has “an overreliance on financial services”, as he described it in a press briefing. At both events he also raised the issue of declining North Sea oil reserves, and you can’t really question the accuracy of that statement. 

In short, the UK needs to diversify. “The search is on for the next wave of world-leading British businesses,” as Gyimah termed it. 

But how easy is that to do? And how realistic is it that the UK, once the financial industry has crumpled post-Brexit and the oil has long since run dry, is basking in the rewards of a “tech-driven, high-growth economy”? 

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