I’ve almost been inclined to stop writing about Economics, because it is just so astonishingly dispiriting. Rachel Reeves originally was Gordon Brown’s Economic Advisor, and of course she was not front-facing; so, what you saw was a serious looking, cerebral appearing, Advisor to arguably the most intellectual politician since Michael Foot’s misguided attempts to lead the Labour Party towards a socialist sub-utopia…
However, if a foot could be placed wrong, Rachel has managed to do it. I literally felt like I had been winded when one of her very first moves was the Employers NIC tax raise: if ever a wrong signal could be sent to our business community, that was it.
I don’t know if our country is in Intensive Care, but we are certainly in A & E, along with the hundreds of thousands of people each day, either underemployed or underproductive in their occupations.
Some months ago, Government launched their Industrial Strategy. I’ve been involved in this area for a long time, and it was a complete damp squib. Little element of progression or momentum, in a “Strategy” that appeared to be more an ad hoc listing of aspirational ideas, that didn’t achieve a collective aim.
An industrial strategy is precisely that: a coherent and strategic path, combining integrated elements of structured economic activity, that you have to go backwards in order to achieve this path. Backwards, in identification of the manual and technical trades’ that you wish to capitalize upon, and re-engineering their Trade courses.
Financing, has to balance the contingency of measurable productivity gains, whilst simultaneously securing repayment, on a rolling schedule that allows necessary capital injections.
Technology: nobody can ever future-proof anything, but you can start. I know that we have the software engineering skills to de-engineer “Deepseek”, and discover exactly why it needs a fraction of the energy input that Chat GPT does.
Private Finance Initiative (PFI), has always shocked external analysts, for being a three letter acronym that holds the Government to ransom in the scale of profit taking upon which it is built. Surely if we are to build assets, we don’t need to be gouged in doing so?
Direction. Who are we, and what do we want to do? We are world leaders in all aspects of the creative arts, yet we can also build and design the most sophisticated and desirable cars in the world… so why should the middle bit be missing? The bulk of the rest of our retail, service and industrial sector presents as a mediocre alternative to our continental competitors. Which is why I spoke at the start about the vital contribution of our Trades’ education.
If Merck has decided not to invest £1Bn in R &D, in the UK, in arguably one of our golden success stories, the pharmaceutical industry – that should be seen as a crisis.
Please, lackluster Labour Gov, take note..
#Budget #Taxbetter #Labour #Industrialstrategy
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