I trust that Cameron is reading up on the Iron Lady.
I hope he’s paying real attention to the bad as well as the good.
By sheer coincidence, this just in, an email from Number 10 titled “StartUp Britain”:
“...We also understand that there’s only so much government can do on its own. That’s why today I supported the launch of a new campaign - StartUp Britain - led by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. They’ve pulled together some amazing offers to encourage more people to strike out and start up. From advice on legal issues to creating business cards, these offers are worth around £1500 to every single start-up...”
And a link pointing to a new website - startupbritain.org.
This is possibly the most encouraging thing yet to come out of Number 10. If you’re going to wield the axe, make sure people have the incentive to create new businesses.
To some extent, that’s addressing a grievance that many still hold against Margaret Thatcher - she patently didn’t realise that a million out of work 2nd-5th generation middle-aged coal miners and their families were not EVER going to be employed in a gainful manner, by the new economy (built as it was around financial services, emerging technologies, and IT, all areas where youth and academic ability tend to be more useful than raw physical stamina / blue collar experience).
If it wasn’t for public sector jobs many parts of the North would still be wall-to-wall unemployment.
Here’s something major dumb: when the mines shut, the Coal Board sold the miners’ cottages to private landlords for £500 a pop - without even bothering to ask the tenants (retired miners and redundant miners) if they wanted to own the property.
As a consequence you have the stupid situation where I live, that my (64 year old) next door neighbor is in hock to his landlord every month and in fact pays more every 2 months than the landlord paid for the freehold 18 years ago... but he was born in that house, so was his dad, his grandad was one of the crew that built the house, and four generations of his family worked the pit.
What was a straight-talking 46 year old miner, made redundant, supposed to do to make ends meet when he had no assets to speak of, his landlord owned his ass, and all the skills he’d acquired were no longer required? No bank would lend him the money to start up on his own and he had no qualifications because the mines didn’t need qualifications when he started working for them.
The Labour government created loads of public sector jobs, so that people like him wouldn’t be counted on the unemployment statistics. Which wasn’t clever. Some jobs did get created, but to be honest, can you imagine a call center hiring elderly former miners who’d be honest enough to admit that they’d respond to an abusive caller by threatening to chin ‘em?
Bravo, Dave.