Just how bad is the economy? The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, warns that hard choices on tax, spending and borrowing need to be made on 30 October when she delivers the first Labour budget since 2010, so poor is the economic legacy. Phooey, respond those still standing in the shredded Tory party. The economy, clipping along at a growth rate north of 2% this year, is in good shape; it is her giving in to her union “paymasters” that is the problem. She responds that the crisis in public sector pay had to be confronted.

Yet widen the economic lens to the condition of corporate Britain and the scale of its presence in new technologies and the Tory bequest is unambiguously bad. Britain simply does not possess a critical mass of ambitious, sizeable-growth companies at the frontiers of technology capable of leading any private sector investment or growth boom.

We may have an outstanding science research base, multiple entrepreneurial startups and the largest venture capital industry in Europe, but turning those assets into a “global science and technology superpower” eludes us. In tech sector after tech sector British representation is painfully thin or just nonexistent, even while there has been the opportunity for it to be very different.

David Connell and Prof Bobby Reddy, of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, address the issue in an important paper, Selling Less of the Family Silver. The UK, box one shows, has only one software company and one electronics company in the respective global top 100s; one medical device maker in the top 50.; no companies at all in the top 25........

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