THEY say you become more right wing as you get older.

The only symptom I’m showing is that I like Billy Bragg a lot less now than I did when I was a teenager.

As a young lad, Sir John Hall was a left wing firebrand. By the 1980s he had become an avowed Thatcherite, who brought the US-style shopping mall to the UK in the shape of the Gateshead Metro Centre.

In a new book on football called Up There – which also charts the region’s economic fortunes – North-East writer Michael Walker hears from Sir John about the things that shaped his career. It turns out that his spirit of free enterprise was unleashed a Labour Government.

The post war Attlee administration was, Sir John reckons, the thing that liberated him from a life tied to the local pit that his parents and grandparents had lived on the Northumberland coalfield.

It’s interesting to hear Sir John say that he fears the region has now lost its raison d’etre. In his view the demise of North-East traditional industries, and a lack of vision and support by successive governments, has left the region drifting without a clear purpose or economic identity.

This is a complaint I hear a lot.

I accept that we have lost a great deal. North-East industries that should have survived into the new millennium – coal, shipbuilding, steel, heavy engineering – are largely gone. This has been hugely damaging to scores of our communities.

But there are serious efforts being made to reshape the North-East as a place that plays a key role in the next industrial revolutions.

Engineer OGN this week started work on a gas pipeline, that will be built on the site of a former Tyneside shipyard.

Last month, we revealed that County Durham company PolyPhotonix had developed a groundbreaking treatment for diabetic blindness that could save the NHS billions, and the sight of thousands.

CPI is investing millions to make Darlington a centre for medical innovation.

We have firms across the region developing graphene – a wonder material that is tipped to transform our lives over the next decade.

We may no longer be an area that makes ships, or fuels the economies of the world. But wherever you look you will find innovative North-East businesses, creating jobs in next generation industries.

If they can do this by combining a bit of Attlee-style social justice then all the better.

Follow me on Twitter @bizecho