We need science white heat more than we do the City

That discussion reminded me how the previous week on a visit to one of the City's big brokers, one of its star traders said that his degree was in nuclear physics, and the desk had two other physicists, three electrical engineers and two chemists. On graduation all of them had headed for the City, not industry, because that was where the money was.

And this neatly encapsulates a problem which is ducked in a report by the inventor Sir James Dyson and published this morning, in which he explores what needs to be done to rebalance the British economy and to help its science and engineering industries to flourish.

Not only do we not educate enough of our brightest and best young people in the sciences but when we do so educate them they get diverted to the City. When Lord Turner talks about finance expanding beyond the point when it is socially useful, he has at least partly in mind the fact that the City starves the rest of the economy of talent.

Rebalancing the UK economy will prove very difficult as long as City salaries continue to be so vastly in excess of what people can earn in jobs elsewhere.

This is not the first report of this kind — most people with any sort of memory can recall similar exercises stretching back decades.

Indeed I fondly recall an exchange in the House of Lords in 1992 when the then Conservative government was taken to task for not enacting the suggestions made in the Finniston Report — so called because a former head of British Steel, Sir Monty Finniston, was the report's chairman. His report was called Engineering: Our Future and it had been published 12 years earlier in 1980, having been commissioned some three years before that — in 1977 — just months after the International Monetary Fund had been called in to help restore Britain's finances.

Finniston forecast a shortage of engineers unless preventative action was taken which would lead to a lack of innovation, a decline of international competitiveness and increasing long-term unemployment in the UK.

It caused a huge stir at the time with much hand-wringing and beating of breasts but of course nothing was going to happen during the Thatcher years which required Government intervention. It was left to the market to sort out and so here we are 30 years on with the same problem.

Indeed, only this month the letters pages of the Financial Times have been enlivened by correspondence about the pressing need to raise the status of engineers so it becomes a more desirable profession.

I'm not knocking Sir James Dyson's report when I say essentially it is pressing similar solutions to Finniston's a generation ago although neither am I particularly inspired with confidence that this time everything will be different — even if the study was produced at David Cameron's behest.

In Sir James's report government is asked to make a sustained and coherent effort to change the UK culture, education, and universities so that science-based careers become more desirable, so that innovation is encouraged, so that what we invent is developed and brought to market so innovators can get finance more easily.

He has to be absolutely right. The trouble is that saying it is the easy bit. It is getting it done which seems to be beyond the wit of any government we have had in this country for the past 30 years. And yet as the financial crisis has shown, we cannot live by debt alone. Finance and housing can no longer provide the illusion of growth.

Our culture does need to change and if our politicians do not lead the effort to make that change it is never going to happen.

Staying put in London is worth the cost

Terry Smith of Tullett Prebon captured his share of headlines back in December when he announced his staff could move abroad rather than stay here and pay the new top tax rate of 50% on incomes exceeding £150,000.

The mood then was such that a visitor from Mars might have concluded that half the City was about to decamp in protest at the tax rise.

But though they are probably still every bit as annoyed today as they were then, relatively few have thus far taken him up on the offer.

The reality of selling one's house, buying another, finding new schools for children, persuading the spouse that he or she will be perfectly happy in the middle of nowhere with no friends and a daily struggle to be understood in a foreign language in fact underlines what they should have already known — relocation is not something to be taken lightly. It should not be lightly threatened either.