Theme Parks Won’t Save Britain: Why We Need a 21st Century Industrial Revolution

From Steel to Silicon: The Bold Plan to Build Britain’s Next Great City

Britain’s economy is spiralling, global trade is fracturing, and supply chains are snapping like cheap plastic. So, what’s Sir Keir Starmer’s master plan? Build a bloody theme park.

Yes, really. As tariffs rattle stock markets from Beijing to New York, and nation-states scramble to claw back manufacturing sovereignty, the Prime Minister’s idea of serious economic planning is to slap a rollercoaster on a failing economy and hope for the best.

Universal Studios will bring growth, jobs, and joy, he says — as if Britain’s collapse into deindustrialised irrelevance can be solved with popcorn and plastic mascots.

Meanwhile, here’s a radical suggestion: how about we build something real? Something that reflects the scale of the crisis we’re actually in. We don’t need another Disneyland of delusion — we need a bold new industrial vision.

The defenders of our current economic arrangement will argue that globalisation lifted millions from poverty (mainly in China) and delivered consumer abundance (mainly through debt). True enough, as far as it goes. But this argument conveniently ignores how these gains were distributed and at what cost to social cohesion, environmental sustainability, and national resilience.

What Britain needs isn’t theme parks or the reheated Thatcherite nostrums that Labour seems determined to serve up with a progressive garnish. What Britain needs is to rebuild – literally.

Imagine this: a brand-new city rising from the ashes of our abandoned industrial Heartlands. AI helps find the location — say, somewhere between Rotherham and Doncaster. A purpose-built metropolis for the 22nd century. Connected, green, ambitious.

Why there? Because it already has the bones: rail, road, even an airport. And more importantly, it has communities still waiting for the economic revival politicians have promised for decades. Want to level up the North? Build the future there.

This wouldn’t be another bland housing estate or gimmicky “innovation hub.” It would be a living, breathing industrial strategy made concrete. A place where AI meets manual labour. Where engineers, builders, artists, and thinkers work side by side to manufacture Britain’s next chapter.

Solar panels in every structure. Green public spaces as standard. Real infrastructure powered by nationalised energy, with steel and materials made here, not bought from abroad at three times the cost.

While Labour talks theme parks and AI supremacy and offshore data centres, we could be training a generation of skilled workers, reviving steelworks, and rebuilding the country — from the ground up.

The economic benefits would be transformative. Hundreds of thousands of jobs created, not just in construction but across every sector of the economy. A powerful stimulus to British manufacturing, from steel to sustainable technologies. A training ground for a new generation of skilled workers. Not jobs serving overpriced coffee or scanning tickets at a theme park, but jobs making things of genuine value and utility.

“But where’s the money coming from?” the fiscal conservatives will wail, temporarily forgetting how quickly they found billions when banks needed bailing out or when pandemic contracts needed distributing to their friends. The truth is that money has never been the constraint – political will has.

This isn’t fantasy. It’s a choice: use public money to rebuild Britain, or use it to subsidise failure, prop up collapsing multinationals, and pretend a theme park is the answer to a trade war.

This government has been given a supermajority. Not to tinker at the edges. Not to play startup founder with taxpayer money. But to show ambition — real ambition. Not a rollercoaster economy, but a solid foundation of concrete, steel, and purpose.

The system has failed. Globalisation is in its death throes. Let the new era begin — not with fireworks at a theme park, but with cranes, steel, and the roar of machines building a future worth living in.

Paul Knaggs, Labour Heartlands

Paul Knaggs