NOBODY in Britain wants to agree with a leather-jacket-wearing American tycoon.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s tough to poke holes in Jensen Huang\u2019s diagnosis of what\u2019s gone wrong with the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
Last week, the Nvidia Corp boss told politicians and investors gathered in a converted London church that the country has enough intellect but not enough entrepreneurial spirit.<\/p>\n
Offered a million ways to win, he said, it tends to find \u201cthe one reason not to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huang does believe there\u2019s talent on this island, a point he underlined by betting millions on five British startups.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s neither the financial environment nor the regulatory climate to allow UK entrepreneurs to think on a grand scale.<\/p>\n
As a House of Lords committee has pointed out, \u201ca procession of promising science and technology companies\u201d is moving overseas.<\/p>\n
Oxford Ionics was bought by US-based IonQ for US$1bil; OrganOx by Japanese medtech group Terumo for US$1.5bil.<\/p>\n
Wise shifted its primary listing to the United States. British companies that want to go big also have to go elsewhere.<\/p>\n
What happened to Britain? This place once teemed with energetic amateurs, wacky inventors and empire-builders.<\/p>\n
How did a country that pioneered everything from football to steam engines to the joint-stock company start searching for reasons to not do things?<\/p>\n
Most UK-based founders I\u2019ve spoken with in the past few months offered up the same reason, unprompted: Britain fears risk-taking.<\/p>\n
Finance here doesn\u2019t have the appetite to support high-risk, high-reward ventures, and the state won\u2019t make the political gambles needed to shape a market through rules or procurement contracts.<\/p>\n
This is a problem beyond tech. In fact, nothing defines the political and economic culture in Britain today so much as a pathological aversion to risk.<\/p>\n
Nobody ever wants anything to change, on the off chance it could be dangerous.<\/p>\n
Fear of what the future might hold has become the national ideology; the main difference between the United Kingdom\u2019s major political parties is which vision of the 1970s they prefer.<\/p>\n
Much of what holds Britain back can be traced to the same timid mindset. Why, for example, are its businesses chronically short of funds to invest?<\/p>\n
For one, UK pension money is no longer in equities; in 2025, pensions held just a quarter of their assets in equities and 56% in bonds \u2013 the lowest and highest shares, respectively, of the world\u2019s seven largest pension markets. The split was 43% and 38% in favour of equities in 2014.<\/p>\n
Too much of the country\u2019s wealth is tied up in property.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s seen as a safe bet that increases in value \u2013 thanks in part to local councils, few of which dare to take a punt on permitting new building.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a chance, after all, that it might spoil someone\u2019s view or draw the wrong sort. Any project that survives is constrained by dozens of well-meaning rules.<\/p>\n
The result isn\u2019t just a stagnant country, but also one that looks and feels poorer.<\/p>\n
Councils fear new neighbours, businesses fear expansion and politicians fear losses or legal challenges. But fear can\u2019t be a country\u2019s organising principle.<\/p>\n
Any modern liberal democracy has the responsibility to protect its people from the worst that might befall them.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why welfare systems like the United Kingdom\u2019s exist.<\/p>\n
But when countries keep expanding the safety net in a doomed attempt to insulate their citizens from any hazard, the system becomes unsustainable \u2013 especially when that same risk-aversion prevents the nation from growing enough to pay for its welfare perfectionism.<\/p>\n
If the United Kingdom isn\u2019t there already, it will be soon. A widely read story in the Wall Street Journal last week outlined the degree to which the system has drifted from its original purpose.<\/p>\n
Disability payments, first designed for victims of industrial accidents, are today claimed by about seven million people \u2013 more than one in 10.<\/p>\n
That number has risen by more than 60% among working-age adults since 2019; no other Western country has seen a comparable increase.<\/p>\n
And when Keir Starmer tried to trim just \u00a35bil (US$6.7bil) off the system\u2019s \u00a3100bil-a-year bill, his backbenchers forced him into a U-turn.<\/p>\n
Investors, depressed to discover that even a government with a huge majority couldn\u2019t fix welfare, sold gilts.<\/p>\n
Ten-year borrowing costs have risen from 4.5% to 5.5% this year, the highest in the Group of Seven.<\/p>\n
Trying to protect people against every possible peril doesn\u2019t abolish risk; it just shifts it to another set of citizens \u2013 who might revolt.<\/p>\n
Brits need look no further than their French neighbours to see how that turns out.<\/p>\n
This is the country that invented cricket and the spinning jenny. It\u2019s also the one that invented insurance.<\/p>\n
Protecting people against risk was a great idea. Such a pity it\u2019s the one that\u2019s come to define modern Britain. \u2014 Bloomberg<\/p>\n
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. The views expressed here are the writer\u2019s own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NOBODY in Britain wants to agree with a leather-jacket-wearing American tycoon. But it\u2019s tough to poke holes in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[28,3200,52308,158,373306,373304,4321,373305,259090,373303],"class_list":["post-890434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-commentary","tag-economicgrowth","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-investmentclimate","tag-jensenhuang","tag-nvidia","tag-riskaversion","tag-techstartups","tag-ukeconomy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}