Keir Starmer's Bloviating and Britain's Robot Density: A Note

Ours is not a great age for oratory, least of all in the political sphere. Still, having had occasion to close-read the remarks of Keir Starmer these past couple of years, the attention accorded his speech to the Confederation of British Industry made it seem reasonable to take up the sure-to-be-dismaying task of perusing the official transcript.

As I had grown to expect with any major statement from Starmer the reading experience mostly consisted of suffering through another recitation of the same New Labour vintage 2022 clichés he uttered in the Labour Party Conference keynote back in September. "Aspiration" and a "fair chance" for people to "succeed." "Partnership" of government with business. Supply-side economics, but "modern" and somehow not "trickle-down" but rather a "New Deal for working people." Yada yada yada, one may say--except that I can't get over Starmer's expecting anyone in 2022 to take seriously the idea that British investors are just itching to pour money into "green" manufacturing and will happily do so if the British government, incidentally while balancing books in extreme disarray, arranges a bit of that "education"/job training for the country's "skill and application"-lacking proles that '90s-era neoliberals always sang as the solution to every problem, and likewise arranges for there to be a few more psychiatrists to aid with their mental health "issues," as if that were all that was holding the country back from the "march of the makers" supposed to lead to some Promised Land of a high-productivity, high-wage economy--and the rescue of the planet to boot! (In reality, thus do Climate Change Action Plans turn instead into natural gas bridges that go on and on what seems like forever to . . . well, we'll find out sometime--and, as the centrists applaud their sniveling about "the art of the possible" as "adults in the room"-caliber "leadership," get reduced to mere footnotes in recountings of the history when anyone bothers to actually write any.)

Still, amid all that a couple of details did catch my eye.

One was Starmer's enlarging a bit on the plan for a British sovereign wealth fund he mentioned in passing in the keynote address. He says that his government would "use it to manage risk on the critical investments we need to become a green growth superpower. But also--to create spill-over opportunities for businesses and supply chains right across the country in manufacturing and services." (It's still hazy in the extreme--the more in as, in line with New Labour tradition and yet more of the rhetoric he is adding to the stock of cliché by way of repeating so much of it from prior speeches--he insists that "sound money . . . come first," and the government not only have every policy "fully costed" but "reduce debt as a share of our economy," even if "this means . . . we won't be able to do . . . good Labour things . . . as quickly as we might like." Still, it's a little more than we got the last time.)

Another, more surprising bit, was his reference to Britain's "robot density," Starmer remarking that "Britain has fewer industrial robots than almost every comparable countries. We're behind Germany, France, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, Belgium--it's a long list."

This being a political speech and Starmer having much else to get to he gave no details (not his forte, anyway), but information on the situation he referenced has been easy to find.

According to the International Federation of Robotics (the main source of statistics of this kind) Britain has a hundred robots per ten thousand workers--which is below average for the world as a whole (the norm 126 per 10,000), never mind the advanced industrial countries.

Where the Group of Seven (G-7) advanced industrial countries are concerned this is about half the figure for Canada (178), France (194) and Italy (224), about two-fifths that of the U.S. (255), and a quarter that of Germany (371) and Japan (390).

Not to be neglected are the figures for the newer industrializers. If China's manufacturing output remains a long way from that of the G-7 it is on par with that of the more advanced states in this important area--with nearly the robot density of the U.S. (246), and Taiwan's figure about the same (248), Hong Kong's a little higher (275), Singapore's more impressive still (605), and South Korea in this way as in so many others, an outlier, with more than twice the robot density of any G-7 member, and about nine times the robot density of Britain (932). Nine.

Considering all this in light of other metrics, like per capita manufacturing output (which has South Korea and Germany and Japan at the top of the list, the U.S. some way down from there, Italy below that, and Britain at the bottom of the advanced country list, so far down China is coming up fast in its rear-view mirror), it seems to me that there is a broad consistency here, affirming that robot density is a meaningful indicator of a country's industrial investment, capability, dynamism. This seems to be reinforced by the fact that investment in robotics is hardly even across the range of industries most evident in high-tech, high-capital sectors. The automotive sector is at the forefront, and electronics not far behind.

The fact that Germany, Japan and South Korea are particularly formidable in those areas (and Britain, to put it mildly, is less so) seems to me to be far from irrelevant to the outcome.

Significant, too, is the fact that if the number of British robot installations is growing, and not by a little either, the country's position in 2020 suggested its falling further behind rather than closing the gap, with all that implies about what these years have meant for investment in a British manufacturing base long starved of it (and what the odds are for any more such investment, in or out of any "Green Prosperity Plan").