Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
At the close of the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, Japan’s then prime minister appeared, unexpectedly, dressed as Super Mario. I don’t know if Shinzo Abe was a gamer, and it is ultimately irrelevant: what it reflected was that he recognised the cultural and economic power of a character who is one of Japan’s most successful exports.
As it happens, one of Mario’s fans can also be found at the heart of the British government: Rishi Sunak used to play Mario Kart on his Super Nintendo and has described it as one of the best games ever. Although the prime minister now has precious little time to game, he is seemingly still interested — he has just finished reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, an excellent beach read about the complicated relationship between two game designers.
Sunak is not the only politician in the UK who games — but curiously, there is not a single member of the country’s unelected second chamber whose primary source of income comes from its video gaming or esports industry. It is a striking oversight given that the UK has more professional game developer studios in it than anywhere else in Europe. The industry is worth about £7bn a year and enjoyed by more than half the population.
Part of that curious absence is a surprise knock-on effect of Brexit. When he was prime minister, David Cameron, together with then chancellor George Osborne and Ed Vaizey, a long-serving culture minister and close ally of the two, recognised the economic contribution of the UK’s gaming industry. They introduced what was at the time a pioneering tax break (other countries have since sped ahead in terms of generous incentives).
But between Cameron’s exit and Sunak’s arrival in Downing Street, government interest in the industry as a way to make money rather than simply spend time with was fairly minimal. If Cameron had remained in office until 2020, as he had planned, at least one of the people elevated to the House of Lords might have been a member of the video games industry.
The absence of gaming peers seems trivial but reflects several important flaws common to the broader political class in the UK. A tendency to confuse contempt for the new with sophistication means that Sunak’s interest in video games is often cited as an example of his “nerdy” habits, or portrayed as a niche interest or curious preoccupation. Sunak is an unapologetic nerd, but this is also a pastime that more than half the British population enjoys taking part in, and one which, in any case, is part of a wider hobby that is almost as old as numbers (backgammon is at least 5,000 years old).
The UK’s lack of pride or interest in its video games industry is part and parcel of a tendency that Sunak often complains about: that the country is not just bad at maths, but proud of it. But it also reflects a problem that his own party is part of: a political class that for one reason or another seems to dislike almost everything the country does well.
Video games are too nerdy. Bankers take too many risks. Universities let in too many immigrants. Lawyers are too litigious. Musicians and actors are too liberal. In any case, far too many of these organisations are full of Remainers who will privately complain that Brexit has made their lives harder. What really connects these sectors is that they are all areas where the UK excels and can and should continue to do so if the country makes the right choices.
The disdain is not always uniform. As far as financial services go, Sunak has appointed ministers who don’t struggle to champion the City. But on the Labour side, the government’s Edinburgh reforms, a relatively small-scale set of changes to British banking, were reflexively opposed. Sunak has also hammered universities in order to spin his failure to keep his promises on immigration. The Labour party is less instinctively hostile to universities, but both parties seem to prefer imagining a UK of smoke stacks and heavy industry, a UK that has largely now long passed, rather than championing the things it does well in the present day.
The coming election will be one in which both parties talk up the importance of growth but often accompanied by heavy caveats. It needs to be growth from the right people, from industries that aren’t too uncool, or too liberal, or too Remain-y, or too concentrated in the wrong places. But what the UK really needs is growth, full stop. Part of how it might get there is a political class which learns to like the things the country does well, rather than the things it feels it “ought” to do well, or wishing that the things it did well were older, more macho or involved more heavy machinery.