Will UK PM’s new science council start ‘picking winners’?

While there is a tendency to cherry pick a few successful cases of industrial style policies as exemplars the reality is government led industrial and technology policies like this ultimately fail (a short example is here -- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2016/01/14/three-reasons-why-industrial-policy-fails/). Ultimately, what matters is not what such a group comes up with but which politically connected players get onto the council and then what bias that introduces as to the 'winners' it seeks to find. Rest assured that there will be a lot of 'wiz bang' stuff and almost nothing related to social sciences and humanities and that it will most likely be just as successful as the policy initiatives of all the prior prime ministers who set up similar groups. The great irony is that a government that apparently believes in global Britain and the value of market based outcomes and removal of EU interference ... is all for a small group of political players trying to hand pick winners that the market, with all its capital and incentives and information, somehow is failing to do.