Last week, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 jet became the first civilian aircraft to break the sound barrier since Concorde when the US company’s demonstrator aircraft achieved supersonic flight over a Californian desert.
The aircraft, which accelerated to 10% faster than the speed of sound, is the company’s trailblazer product, leading the way to the development of Overture – Boom’s supersonic commercial airliner.
The team behind this triumph was fewer than 50 in number. Many of them were fresh out of college.
Do we really feel like this could be done in the UK today – the country that just a few decades ago jointly built Concorde?
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the US’s genius innovators, are battling it out to see who can launch the best and the biggest rocket into space.
Last year Musk’s SpaceX launched Starship and caught its booster with ‘chopsticks’.
Earlier this year, Bezos’s space company Blue Origin successfully launched New Glenn into orbit.
US entrepreneurs are doing and achieving what too many in the UK – despite our awesome industrial and entrepreneurial heritage – now feel is impossible to do here.
That was always the risk of a heavily-regulating and high-taxing Labour Government.
But it goes deeper than party politics – and many UK politicians do not really understand the scale of what has just happened in the US.
America is forging ahead basically because entrepreneurs, businesses, innovators and tech are in total psychological lockstep with the new administration.
There is now a deep and powerful alliance of ideas and ambition between the Trump White House and the US’s best entrepreneurs.
Whether it’s ‘drill baby drill’ or ‘we are so back’, the rhetoric of a leader sets the tone for a nation’s ambition.
It’s pretty tragic that the UK is off-cycle – and we certainly won’t be hearing the same level of ambition from our Prime Minister.
But we can’t whinge about it – we have to focus on getting back there.
Next time around we must be able to say the UK is ‘so back’ – like we have never seen before.
I was struck by a tweet last week from San Francisco-based Perplexity AI – founded by a group of engineers from the likes of Meta and OpenAI only a couple of years ago – who offered the premium version of their AI app for free for a year to all American public servants.
It’s all part of the DOGE push to get stuff done quicker and better in government – helping deliver better outcomes for citizens – and crucially, saving taxpayer dollars.
I use Perplexity AI all the time, so I thought I’d jump in and ask whether UK civil servants with a gov.uk email address could also be included.
Within minutes, the founder immediately said yes.
So take note Whitehall officials (and many others) – you can now improve your workflow by hopping into the pro plan of Perplexity AI for free.
This is an example of a tool that will streamline work and increase productivity in the public sector – absolutely what we need here in the UK. I hope civil servants take it up.
How many studies, committees, reports, inquiries and manifestos have we had to endure asking the big questions and thinking the big thoughts about how we improve public sector productivity?
It turns out ‘you can just do things’ instead – and really get stuff done.
Great British startups and entrepreneurs understand this because it’s absolutely built into their DNA and their experience.
But policymakers – and parliamentarians – often really don’t.
It isn’t that the talent isn’t out there. The country is brimming with great founders, and there have been many success stories.
But there are also far too many who are being held back because the UK’s political (and media) mindset and somewhat miserablist conversation is just so badly out of step with the vibe of ‘you can just do things’.
Last week the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, announced her focus on growth – with a welcome package of measures to help get difficult stuff built in the UK.
It’s all very well making the announcement, but Britain, and the Labour Government, needs to more deeply embrace the ‘you can just do things’ mindset – which means so much more than simply top-down direction of infrastructure projects.
It means radically deregulating and lifting the burdens from founders and entrepreneurs. They will provide the ‘growth’ part and get things done themselves – once the government is out of the way but on board with their vibe.
Reeves said the Government is going to publish an action plan later this year to ‘make regulation work much better for our economy’.
This is better than nothing but misses the point – it’s not about making the regulations in place work, it’s about deregulating and adopting the founder mindset – not the manager mindset which is absolutely native mode for most politicians.
For instance, the Chancellor’s speech would have given me more hope had she not literally just delivered a massively anti-growth tax-hiking Budget.
It is impossible to give a proper and convincing growth speech without dumping the fiscal mistakes made in the Budget.
Once again in our history, the vital inspiration of America teaches Brits afresh that we do not need to hold ourselves back.
It should be compulsory for all UK politicians to adopt ‘founder mode’ from now on. If not, they should not be running things as ministers.
It should be compulsory for them to help create the conditions where everyone can ‘just do things’.
Then this great country, like our American cousins, will be so back.
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