Successive governments have to failed to nurture the country's great innovators
Will Hutton is absolutely spot on when he claims that Britain's future lies in a culture of open and vigorous innovation. ("Our future lies in a culture of open and vigorous innovation", Comment). Four of the world's leading universities lie within 40 miles of one another and the UK is second only to the US in academic citations. The challenge is to pull through the natural inventiveness of universities into jobs and profit in firms. The Council for Industry and Higher Education has been working on this challenge for the past year in its Task Force on Enhancing Innovation and it is obvious that if the UK is not to be the world's best contract researcher it must ensure that its innovation system is geared to growth. We must turn our world-leading knowledge into a world-beating knowledge economy.
Dr David Docherty
Chief executive, Council for Industry and Higher Education
London WC1
While sharing Will Hutton's aspiration for the UK being a future innovator , it is hard to be confident a UK government will ever deliver the conditions necessary.
Unlike our international competitors, they are too hung up on puerile – private is good, public bad, market forces – dogma, their largely Oxbridge education omitting the salient fact that since before Victoria the British economy was the greatest nationalised enterprise in history, fuelled by empire with taxes paying for the weapons and armed forces to defend it. Having espoused the myth that the UK's former prosperity was somehow created solely on the back of private capital, for 40 years governments have wound down the national wealth-sustaining industries they inherited so that now vast sums must flow from the UK to our competitors' state and state-supported enterprises – our railway materials from Italy, France and the US, Scottish and Channel ferries from Poland and Finland, MoD auxiliaries from Germany, the Netherlands and Romania, our coal and gas from Russia: the list goes on and on.
Here in Cumbria we can see a microcosm of the UK economy: the squandering of resources combined with expediency. Our leaders look to bury the UK's and much of the world's radioactive nuclear waste in unsafe ground, while looking at the last politically respectable public spending – the Trident nuclear weapons system – being replaced.
They are supporting in BAe a last vestige of manufacturing, retaining a modicum of engineering skills, while simultaneously writing off forever our beautiful but small-scale fractured landscape as a nuclear dumping ground. It will need politicians to get a grip on reality and display an intelligence, foresight and leadership that have been conspicuous by their absence over so many years.
Robert Straughton
Ulverston, Cumbria
With splendid rhetoric, Will Hutton wants this country to become "a leading global innovation hub" but he fails even to mention the crucial importance of the school system in educating and motivating the "originators and load-bearers of ideas" in their formative years. He also fails to castigate the education policies of a government that with its misguided EBacc policy privileges ancient history over technology, Latin over the creative arts, and which seeks to provide our youngest schoolchildren with an impoverished, unbalanced diet of so-called but misnamed "basics" that threaten to kill off creativity, curiosity and intellectual excitement from age five onwards.
Professor Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria
Will Hutton is right about the need for a culture of innovation, but there are a few things we need to get sorted out first. Our overheads are too high (eg property and the nuclear deterrent) and we waste too much, (eg food, land, water, power and people). We also lack the political will, the political energy and the political sense of direction.
Martin London
Denbighshire, Wales