AFTER a generation in the wilderness, industry is back in fashion. Scarcely a day goes by without a politician extolling the near-forgotten virtues of making things and selling them to other people; what a shame that our leaders did so little for industry, and for so long.

This week Donald Trump, a man who made his billions from property development and is not known for making anything but money and a few tabloid headlines, “saved” 600 jobs apparently destined to leave Indiana for Mexico. United Technologies will receive $7 million in tax breaks in exchange for retaining one-third of the 2,100 jobs in the US. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was allowed to take credit for retaining 300 research jobs in the US, even though it had not intended to move them.

Well, this is Mr Trump’s honeymoon period and it says something about the desperate state of politics that a right-wing politician sees electoral value in “saving” manufacturing jobs. Here in the UK, Theresa May confounds 40 years of Tory policy to promise a “new” industrial strategy.

Their motives are clear. Mr Trump has made great play of the impact of globalisation on manufacturing jobs. Many firms switched to low-cost countries to meet the profit targets demanded by investors. Do not imagine globalisation is some fiendish plot intended to create millions of jobs in China or Mexico. That is simply a by-product of a system whose real winners were the money men of Wall Street and the City of London.

As Britain demonstrated so badly during the 1970s and 1980s, losing an industry is quite easily done. Reviving it is a different story. To incentivise United to stay in Indiana – or to underwrite post-Brexit tariffs to Nissan, as the UK Government is suspected of doing – is not industrial strategy. These are no more than short-term political interventions.

So what should a new industrial strategy look like? It should concentrate on what we are good at. The speedy growth of two Scottish companies – Skyscanner and FanDuel – demonstrates our tech sector can build companies of scale. One has been sold and the other merged, but they achieved high valuations and reach international consumer markets from a Scottish base. What else are we good at? Industrial design? Renewable technologies? Life sciences? Food and drink?

We have made real advances in each but industrial strategies are for the long-term and the UK has demonstrated time and again that it is not good at sustaining such an approach.

German economic strategy and immense trading position are built on retaining manufacturing. Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, some of the biggest producers of crude oil, are making long-term commitments to a low-carbon future including solar power and green technologies.

That sort of planning involves financial and political commitment. At present, the only thing Britain is growing is its debt mountain as it enters Brexitworld. It would be nice to think that a British manufacturing strategy, or a Scottish one, might look past the next election and prepare properly for the future, just this once.