The CBI billed it as a “major speech”, which is a judgment best left to others, but, yes, Tony Danker, the director general of the CBI, made a couple of excellent points on Monday as he addressed the current obsession in UK boardrooms: where is the national plan for growth?
First, it’s time for the UK to stop congratulating itself of having built so many offshore windfarms, and understand that “a subsidy arms race”, as Danker put it, is under way in green investment. The dramatic phrase may sound like a plea for corporate handouts (and, up to a point, it is) but it is also a widely held assessment of President Joe Biden’s misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act. A $369bn (£298bn) package to direct subsidies towards green technologies is enormous and has the potential to change the investment landscape and increase the gravitational pull of the US. It is a hard piece of legislation to ignore.
