No party has offered an exciting vision of Britain’s business future

The best line I heard out on the campaign trail on the stormy North Norfolk coast yesterday was when a young woman said she was taking Schopenhauer’s advice when asked her voting intentions.

It won’t surprise you to hear the Conservative canvasser was stumped. So the voter explained that the great German philosopher believed that it’s by studying a man – or woman’s – features that you discover their moral and intellectual character; that the outside reflects the inner soul of a man. And that she would vote on the basis of which of the three local candidates she finds the most attractive and reassuring.

Her reasoning? “How else should I rate them? None of them are talking about the serious issues. How are we going to grow the economy? What is the future of work and how will it be affected by automation?”

“What skills and training should the young be pursuing? And how do we fund them? That’s what I want to hear the politicians talking about: forget strong and stable vs coalition of chaos. These are the issues that matter to me. Are they all frightened to talk about it because they have no strategy, or what?”

How right she is. One of the more extraordinary aspects of this election – and there are many – has been the poverty of any discussion on these pertinent subjects. Yes, there has been some nibbling at the edges over whether the manifestos are costed or not and the usual entirely predictable tit for tats over public spending cuts.

Yet there has been almost no debate over how we improve productivity, and use the levers available in both the private and public sectors to rev up the engine, particularly in manufacturing and high-growth areas of the economy such as FinTech and the life science industries.

If the Brexit vote showed anything at all, it was that the Leave vote saw the biggest increases where manufacturing is vital to a regional economy. For example, here in East Anglia, where goods exports are 20.8% of GDP, the Leave vote was  56% and in North Norfolk, up to 60%. Further to the east in Great Yarmouth, where the once great fishing industries have been ripped out of the town, the Leave vote was a staggering 74%. No surprise there.

Even in wealthier mid-Norfolk, where people make their living from farming or by sausage making and turkey plucking, the Leavers were in the majority with 60%.

It’s worth remembering just how high the Brexit votes were in regions across the country. In Wales, nearly 30% of GDP is from goods exported, and the Leave vote was 52.5%. In Sunderland – or Brexit Central – where the main employer Nissan is a big exporter – Leave won by 22 points. It’s no coincidence that Redcar, which saw a whopping vote for Brexit, has seen the slow and steady decline of its steel industry.

The link between manufacturing and Brexit is subtle but has not been fully appreciated by either the politicians or policy-makers. While manufacturing is still a big employer in many of these regions, these industries are permanently under threat from globalisation. And it’s the precarious nature of their work that has led to people feeling so uncertain about the future, and more vulnerable to threats of immigration, whether real or imagined.

That’s why whoever takes the keys to No 10 this week needs to make manufacturing a priority. The last Conservative Government’s green paper for creating a new industrial strategy set out some good ideas but it now needs to be put on steroids.

Ironically, the UK is home to some of the world’s most sophisticated manufacturing ranging from aerospace to life sciences to agri-business, particularly here in Norfolk where the new research centres around Norwich are paving the way to another agricultural revolution. The UK also leads the field in AI, automation and digitisation, otherwise known as the fourth industrial revolution or 4.0.

But as a country we are hopeless at properly supporting these industries – from building up the supply chains, to R&D and, most vitally, to educating our workforce. For employment in advanced manufacturing requires advanced skills and tragically our skills framework just is not delivering. Which is why these sectors rely so much on EU immigrants to get a skilled workforce.

As well as rebooting the education system, we need to look again at getting industry and schools to work more closely on skills and technical training. There needs to be much better funding for Further Education and apprenticeships and, frankly, universities should stop soaking up all the richer students into the humanities.

And there’s only one way to do this, which is to incentivise schools to re-introduce technical subjects into the curriculum and to encourage school leavers into apprenticeships across the country. Some new University Technical Colleges (UTCs) have been opened. At the same time, the Sainsbury recommendations for Technical Education need to be adopted.

If the Brexit voting patterns discussed earlier taught us anything, there must be better links between local schools, local FE colleges and local business to boost industry. There’s much more to be done too in helping support industry across the country: whoever wins must be encouraged to keep up the 3% target of GDP to be spent on R&D, LEPs should be kept in place and expanded, business rates must be reformed and politicians should look at introducing a National Productivity Target.

You can’t blame our young woman voter for preferring Schopenhauer’s analysis of physiognomy as a more accurate guide to a politician’s intent than his or her manifesto. We are about to embark on the biggest shift in the UK’s trading for decades, yet neither of our two main party leaders have uttered an honest word on what could be done.

All we have heard from Theresa May is that she will pull out of the single market and the customs union but she has given no detail about how Free Trade Agreements might work or how we might achieve agricultural reform when the subsidies are reduced. May’s arguments that she can’t reveal her negotiating hand before going into battle are no longer enough. Jeremy Corbyn’s promises that we can stay in the single market and customs unions and also control immigration is a pipe dream.

What’s most shocking of all is that neither May nor Corbyn have had the imagination to inspire – or indeed – stir us with a vision for the future. Is this because they don’t one or they have been so badly advised not to reveal it ? No wonder Ms Norfolk is going for soul rather than posturing.