As secretary of state for business, Sajid Javid was all about the business and very little about the state – so much so that he reportedly banned the words “industrial” and “strategy” being used in conjunction. Certainly he never put them together himself. So hearing Theresa May call for a new, active role for the state was a welcome change.

As innovation economist Mariana Mazzucato has recently argued, “false choices between market and state” are counterproductive. Instead, genuine industrial and technological progress needs to be guided by a long-term vision that mobilises both public and private investment.

Unfortunately, the government’s consultative green paper on industrial strategy, published three weeks after Labour’s, doesn’t provide such a vision. It has plenty of pillars — ten, in fact