Douglas Carswell's Blog

Back to the 1970s?

Twitter might not have existed, but back in the 1970s there were plenty of people in Whitehall who believed that Britain needed to have an industrial policy.

For a while now I have feared that we are drifting back to those days with a kind of corporatism dot com.

Today I see that the head of the UK civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake, chose to draw our attention to a blog by a senior TUC official calling for an end to free market laisser faire economics via twitter. 

I know that a re-tweet is not an endorsement, but shouldn't this make us pause and think?

What precisely does the top mandarin in Whitehall think he is doing plugging a blog on twitter that calls for a British industrial policy?  Didn't we hold a series of General Elections to decide this kind of thing?     

Advocates of an industrial policy tend to believe that human social and economic affairs can best be arranged by grand design.  The Whitehall mandarinate tend to see themselves as the grand designers. 

Unchecked by democratic accountability, this is how we ended up in such a mess in the 70s - and may yet do again.   

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