Monday 03 August 2026 10:32 am  |  Updated:  Monday 03 August 2026 10:33 am

Jonathan Reynolds’ industrial strategy is straight out of the 60s

By: Eliot Wilson

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Jonathan Reynolds, the new business secretary, has set out a vision for publicly owned services, with private sector partnerships, still under public control – a baffling vision from some eccentric economic bestiary, says Eliot Wilson

Andrew Murray Burnham has been in Downing Street for two weeks now. He promised – new Prime Ministers always promise – change, a fresh start, a new approach. In Burnham’s case this is good news for the polo shirt industry, but what has been surprising is the degree to which, under the surface, the new government leans heavily (and damagingly) on nostalgia.

Last week I wrote about the widespread dismay caused by Burnham’s decision to break up the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, a Rishi Sunak creation only three years old. There has been little convincing reassurance from the government that science and technology will not be marginalised, but, purely in terms of Whitehall turf wars, the major winner has been the enlarged and cumbersomely titled Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, or DBIST. To sit at the controls of this new dirigiste scourge of “neoliberalism” Burnham chose Jonathan Reynolds.

Reynolds was interviewed by The Financial Times recently, and it was a revealing encounter. A North-Easterner by birth, he is an adoptive member of Team Burnham: he worked as an........

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