Douglas Carswell's Blog

Hezza's growth plan? corporatist calls for corporatism

Lord Heseltime's plan to stimulate growth apparently calls for more money for LEPs. More R&D via tax credits. A bigger RDF ....

Who knew prosperity could be so easy?  You simply add to the alphabet soup of officialdom, and - hey presto! - we will be rich.

Hezza's plan sounds suspiciously like a corporatist wish-list.   Lots of grand plans - and confidence in the ability of grand planners.

But if regional quangocrats produced prosperity, we'd already be booming.

There's no shortage of officials drawing salaries in the belief that they can produce economic growth.  There just never seems to be much actually growth to show for it.

Haven't we heard this sort of thinking before?  Didn't we have decades of cheap credit and monetary stimulus - which landed us in this mess - precisely because public officials presumed they could engineer prosperity?

What we need is a report that recognises that prosperity is what happens when we get public officials out of the way.

Britain is getting poorer because we lack competitiveness, not because we are short of corporatist quangos.

If you ask a rather grand corporatist to write a report on stimulating growth, don't be surprised if it turns out to be full of grand corporatism.   I do hope that someone thought of this before they asked Lord H to write it?

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