Faced with diminishing returns from natural resources like North Sea oil and an erosion of traditional industries, New Labour has embraced the information age with a will. The Department of Trade and Industry has a science and innovation minister, in the shape of Lord Sainsbury. The government also has an innovation website, which like the DTI's own site, is littered with references to the 'knowledge economy'. New Labour, ever adroit when it comes to adopting fashionable vocabularies, now talks about 'knowledge transfer' and 'collaborative working'. It wants to make the UK a 'knowledge hub' and talks up the 'interaction between science and business'. And it is right to be concerned. The UK is slowly waking up to a jobs exodus, as law firms and financial services companies, for example, export jobs to India and other parts of Asia in the interests of cost cutting (see this issue, p48). The government has acknowledged that the UK cannot compete with the lower labour costs of these economies and is focusing its attention on job creation at home through science and technology.
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