LABOUR talks of Britain becoming a clean energy and AI “superpower.” It champions its commitment to delivering an industrial strategy.

Yet too often it is asleep at the wheel, allowing private companies to determine the fates of strategic sectors based on their own profit-and-loss metric without regard to the public interest. This has already had a damaging impact on our steel industry, and appeared to spell curtains for the petrochemicals centre at Grangemouth until recently, though a pledge of £200 million to turn it into a hub for new industries — extracted after intense campaigning by the Unite union — offers hope wiser councils have prevailed.

But all the government’s talk of becoming a world leader in new technologies will come to naught unless it faces up to the crisis engulfing universities — institutions crucial to research and development.