As a scattering of snow settles on the desolate site at Blyth in Northumberland that might have become the £3.8 billion Britishvolt battery factory, differences of opinion over the failure of this would-be flagship of the UK’s electric vehicle revolution become clearer. For Andrew Orlowski in the Daily Telegraph, it’s ‘a surprising success’, ministers having rightly declined to inject public funds into a venture with no market-ready technology, no customers and an executive team with a taste for private jets: at least ‘we know we won’t have another DeLorean to rue’.

For the Observer, by contrast, it’s ‘a new low for ministers… to boast about cash they saved by not investing in Britishvolt, especially when the firm’s only hope of success was for the government to take a strategic stake’. And for Matthew Brooker of Bloom-berg, noting Boris Johnson’s early praise for the project, Britishvolt’s crash is evidence of the ‘fantasy’ of Brexit opportunity and ‘a monument to Global Britain’s empty hype’.

So who’s right? First, let’s not crow at the demise of bold start-ups: they’re the lifeblood of capitalism. But this one was not led by boffins who’d perfected a better battery: its founders failed to convince potential investors that the technology they were developing would be ahead of the pack. Golden prizes await the inventor of the lighter, cheaper, longer-life electric vehicle battery, but so far as anyone knows, this wasn’t it.

And as UK carmakers switch to EV production, of course they need reliable supplies of batteries, preferably onshore rather than across the North Sea. But with leapfrogging technologies and huge capital demands, that’s likely to be achieved by the car giants themselves investing in or partnering with proven battery makers – as Nissan has done with a Chinese firm, Envision, which operates the UK’s only major battery facility adjacent to Nissan’s own Sunderland plant.

For the UK’s auto industry to remain viable as part of sophisticated cross-border assembly systems, despite Brexit obstacles, it has to be super-efficient and state-of-the-art. Nothing we know about Britishvolt suggests it was fit to play a key role in that survival. Ministers were wrong to invest too much hope and hyperbole but right, in the end, not to risk taxpayers’ money.

Growth and gusto

At a time when Downing Street has been strangely sotto voce on the UK’s prospects for a return to growth, business leaders have not been holding back. Sir James Dyson of the vacuum cleaners says the government’s policy of imposing ‘tax upon tax’ on companies instead of ‘incentivising private innovation’ is ‘as short-sighted as it is stupid’. Dame Alison Rose of NatWest observes that her business customers are ‘coping with the here and now’ but noticeably not investing for future growth. Then there’s Tony Danker, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry – a former Guardian executive whom I described when he was appointed in 2020 as an ‘unpromising’ addition to the ‘grey parade’ of recent holders of a post which, though speaking for 1,500 larger UK companies, seemed to have lost much of its clout in national debate.

On the contrary, Danker’s distinctive Belfast tones have lately been cutting through loud and clear. First – contemplating the imminent rise in corporation tax from 19 to 25 per cent and the abolition of the well-received ‘super-deduction’ for capital expenditure – he argues (as this column has done) for a smarter, more competitive corporate tax regime to encourage business investment, irrespective of the need for higher personal tax revenues to reduce fiscal deficits.

Second, he makes the sensible case that if government won’t relieve labour shortages by easing immigration – even for seasonal fruit-pickers and the like – then urgent action is needed on childcare, skills and NHS treatment for long-term ailments to maximise the productivity and availability of the workforce that’s already here.

Danker addressed these themes with such gusto on Monday’s Today programme – ahead of a longer speech, worth listening to online, titled ‘Is the UK in a rut on growth?’ – that I wondered what superfuel he ingests for breakfast.

The digital tax scandal

Searching for excuses to cover his tax embarrassment, the Tory party chairman Nadhim Zahawi might have claimed that he was traumatised by the prospect of ‘making tax digital’ (MTD). Many honest taxpayers, struggling to meet the 31 January self-assessment deadline under existing rules, dread the idea of having to master new online reporting systems. And having been HMRC’s boss during his short stint as chancellor last summer, Zahawi must have been doubly horrified to discover this major policy initiative in such disarray.

Intended to make the UK ‘one of the most digitally advanced tax administrations in the world’, MTD was announced in 2015 with the aim that its first stage would go live by 2018. But the switch to full digital VAT reporting was eventually delayed to 2022 and for income tax until 2026-27. A survey commissioned by HMRC last year found 45 per cent of all taxpayers still kept paper records while only 38 per cent thought MTD would make their lives easier.

Older citizens will most likely solve the MTD problem by paying more fees to their accountants. As for smaller VAT-registered traders and freelances, I suspect many have opted to de-register (thereby reducing HMRC receipts) rather than face the MTD challenge. I eventually found a solution for myself by downloading Quickbooks – the small-business package used, astonishingly, by Sam Bankman-Fried to run his now-bankrupt multibillion crypto empire FTX. But it took several chatboxes and call centres, one in the Philippines, to make it work.

Of course, in the modern world, tax must go digital like everything else. But the way MTD has been implemented may eventually be judged a bigger scandal than the short story of Nadhim Zahawi.