IN 1991 when the clear-faced Queen, dressed memorably in blue protective clothing while all around her were people wearing white suits and masks, opened the £340m Fujitsu Japanese semi-conductor factory at Newton Aycliffe, there were extremely high hopes. These chips are vital to computers so the market was imagined to be immense and there were expectations the factory would soon employ 1,500 people.

Those expectations were never fulfilled. There was global competition for this crucial market. Fujitsu closed in 1998 with hundreds of redundancies, although the factory was soon bought by Filtronic. It sold out in 2007 and since then the company has had a number of names, each with a slimmed down workforce.

Now the British government has spent £20m buying out the business, now named Octric Semiconductors UK, saving 100 jobs.

Governments around the world are throwing money at their semi-conductor sectors because they are so vital – the EU is offering £43bn of subsidies; the Americans £41bn. Britain cannot afford to get left behind, especially as the Newton Aycliffe factory is the only one in the country capable of manufacturing gallium arsenide semi-conductors, which are used in specialist military equipment, like fighter jets.

This intervention by the Government is welcome, and one wonders whether it marks a new approach after 14 years of Conservative-led rule. Labour is to renationalise most railways within five years and is setting up a state-run energy company.

Steel, like semi-conductors, is strategically important yet Britain is about to become the only G20 country without the capacity to make virgin steel – we’ll soon only be able to recycle it. Perhaps, by now, it has become too expensive for the British government to save steel-making but, with its new-found interventionist hat on, why won’t it get involved to keep train-making alive just a few hundred yards away from its newly-purchased semi-conductor factory in Newton Aycliffe?

READ THE STORY ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT BUYING THE AYCLIFFE SEMI-CONDUCTOR FACTORY HERE