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We could start with the renegotiation of every single PFI contract signed off by Gordon Brown.

That would return billions to the Treasury.

It's grim up north London...

Dear oh dear Mrs Thatcher must wonder what has happened to the Conservative Party and to the business leaders of Britain.

Is the Coalition now saying the government has a role in creating economic growth beyond cutting spending, taxes and red tape?

That will mark a fundamental break with the Thatcherite legacy.

Cameron really does have more in common with Blair than Thatcher - how funny!

Incredible. The too hard and too fast cuts and unethically targeted austerity has been thought through, decided and written down on the back of a conservative fag packet in quick time.
Yet the essential part of the plan, growth................................well thats still to be worked out!!!

Well, personally I blame the British sickness for all of this - the dependency culture. When are british business leaders and the captains of industry going to get up of their ample rear ends and do something about our problems rather than waiting for the Government to come riding to their rescue with growth plans, subsidies and hand-outs. Time they were contributing to the Big Society, putting in extra hours for free to put things right.
Mixed messages?

They have been in power for 8 months saying nothing more than austerity, austerity, austerity - deficit cuts, deficit cuts, deficit cuts. Now they have decided to learn another word for their vocabulary.

Sounds like even the private school education system is going down hill!

Every time I hear Clegg speak I think he would make a good Shakespearean actor always ready to resort to hyperbole and metaphors. They use to call Neil Kinnock the old windbag and now we have found his progeny. Just one example the HS rail link where the dubious benefits (a part from the boost of construction) will not be delivered until the end of this decade. He could boost the construction industry by re instating the cuts to public capital spending and allow council to spend some of the millions locked up in capital receipts on housing for the low paid. It will be all smoke and mirrors.

"..more based on making things and less on making financial instruments, more spread around the UK and less focussed on the South East. It is an ambition shared by many across the political spectrum."

The Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish have their own governments promoting business in their countries. Shouldn't Nick Clegg, who represents an English constituency be focussed on making "financial instruments" (whatever they are) more spread around England?

Sadly "England" is still a forbidden word in the UK parliament. The other home nations have governments working in their interests - England has the likes of Nick Clegg who can't even say "England" let alone work in the interests of the English.

'It is an ambition shared by many across the political spectrum.'

Labour share those ambitions do they ? Didn't they succeed in achieving the polar opposite of each one of those stated ambitions over a period of 13 years. When did they change their minds exactly. Or do we just assume they're hopelessly incompetent ?

Low interest rates are not stimulating growth because they are not being passed on where it counts. How many people are charged 0.5% interest on their loans?? For people on fixed rate mortgages, the majority of UK homeowners, who pays 0.5% interest on their repayments?

The current low interest rate benefits only the banks who are hoarding their money after the banking crisis, and paying peanuts to savers. It also drives up inflation and does nothing to improve the situation in the property market, where house prices far exceed average earnings, repossessions and insolvency's are on the rise and mortgage approvals are at a record low.

But the fundamental flaw in the government growth strategy is the naive assumption that the private sector will simply hoover up the redundancies in the public sector, when these people will have totally different employment and skill backgrounds. Clerical officers aren't suddenly going to land plum jobs in factories, nor have they any skills relevant to the workshop floor. In any case is growth in the private sector expected to be an overnight sensation? I can't see any of these government growth measures having a sufficient impact in time to counteract the huge job losses taking place now in UK councils.

Benefits are being slashed, so less money for the burgeoning unemployed means consumerism in this country will remain on a downward spiral, which is bad news given it has driven his economy for the past 10 years or so.

"Next week they hope - at last - to be able to unveil a banking package containing guaranteed commitments to increase lending to businesses."

Yes Nick, this is key, it's what they should be concentrating on. There's a limit to what they can do in most spheres (given the macho choice made on accelerated deficit reduction) but with the banks the government is well placed - or it should be, let's say - having just bought a large chunk of the industry and bailed out the (failed) sector generally. There's no excuse for not acting in this area - this very important area - and so I'm hopeful and I can't wait (!) to see the report next week.

#276 Sagamix (from the previous blog)

There is a logical problem with determinism (see the paradox in the last sentence of my #248). Or at least there was a logical problem when I last wrote an essay on it.

I can't imagine many people taking the slightest notice of the leading Lib/Dem Tory stooge, unless of course he begins to talk about tuition fees, VAT increases and control orders. All this talk of planning,Hayek and Friedman will be turning in their graves.Have the Tories lost their faith in the market to allocate resources? Is Redwood right, along with Mervyn King to make it plain that the Bullingdon Kids are both lightweights and true novices? Shackling the banks? they will be rolling with laughter this weekend.
Adopting the European approach? Bill Cash and his grotesque cabal of Little Englanders will will be thrilled with that approach.
Changes to planning laws - which one of the Ridley's is to be resurrected?
The only thing keeping these fools in government is their attachment to ministerial salaries and cars, get prepared for the backlash.

I'm afraid Nick Clegg wouldn't know a 'growth plan' if one jumped up and bit him on the backside.

Why should anyone trust the LibDems on anything ever again?

4#

You might have said that tongue in cheek IDBI, but, there may be more truth in it than what you bargained for.

Just because they did all the wrong things, doesn't mean that it won't work. They have never had a plan other than protecting the wealth of the wealthy.
Let the banks steal the people's money.
Give the banks more of the people's money.
Borrow back the people's money had high interest rates.
Tax the the people to pay for the loans of their own money.
Absolve the banks of any responsibility for the retirements accounts they diminished.
Cut services and jobs to spur the economy.
Sounds like a great plan.
As Cicero would ask: Who benefits?

2 Cassandra

Is the Coalition now saying the government has a role in creating economic growth beyond cutting spending, taxes and red tape?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Let's hope not.

They should set out clear plans for cutting taxes, cutting public spending, cutting regulation and abolishing the minimum wage. They should then get out of the way and stay out of the way.

If it "isn't the job of the state to back winners", the banks aren't lending and the venture capitalists are still licking their wounds from the credit crash, WHOSE JOB IS IT TO INVEST?

The trouble with the ConDems is that by rejecting any role for the state in industry they have effectively walked away from the problem and all they have left is more of the same that got us into this mess - deregulation.

Clegg thinks deregulating the planning process will help...?

Take it to its logical conclusion - go visit a city with virtually no planning - Jakarta for example - it floods, the traffic situation is impossible and the levels of pollution are off the scale. Just how far towards Jakarta are we prepared to go?

A society with no law is by definition anarchy - the laws a society operates are a measure of its civilisation - that's not to say there aren't bad laws however, but the proposition that less law equals more freedom is also to infer potentially less civilisation - go ask a Jakarta family how free they feel in their urban hell.

Democratic accountability through elected representatives is the basis of our electoral system - the "Big Society" where our elected councillors are presented as fundamentally unrepresentative and therefore need to be sidelined is a contradiction in terms - if you don't like the reality of local and national politics, fine, change it - attempting to sabotage and emasculate it is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Cameron seems to think that the "Big Society" is an alternative to the "Democratic Society" - we swap elected representatives for self-appointed activists, we end public ownership and convert local services into a mishmash of private businesses, charities and self-help groups. This will end the peoples' ability to change things through the ballot box - is this the policy of an anarchist, a fascist or a stalinist? History will decide.

Clegg's apparent desire to restructure the Uk economy sounds good but if he wants a more european business environment he needs to look at how the Germans, French etc have acheived this - through the tripartite system, state involvement and more regulation, not less.

Bad law needs reform - advocating less law for the sake of it is dogmatic.

The obsession for unregulated free markets is closer to a religious belief than practical politics or economics. Market failure in financial services, the privatised rail industry of US healthcare are realities and the nearest economy that tried to grow through deregulating planning and construction is Eire - and look where that took them.

If Clegg wants to create jobs in construction, a decent programme of social housing is where he should start - kill two birds with one stone - more jobs AND more homes, not harebrained railway schemes to spend billions to shave 20 minutes off the London-Birmingham journey.

Does that "making more things" mean more UK companies making more things or does it mean more overseas companies coming here and making things?

Problem we have is two fold.

Firstly, the Treasury would much prefer everyone else develops all the new technologies and products so we can buy what we want from them when we want it and secondly there is nothing like enough risk equity capital available in the UK to fund all these nice new manufacturing companies and in any case few of those that hold the purse strings actually understand technology and markets!

But of course Brown said all this. He told us he wanted a "US style enterprise economy". Instead though we ended up with a sort of command economy.

3#

Even Darling would have had to have done it lefty. Rusty Ironman and the pitbull would have left him no choice either. You can whine about the ethics of it as much as you like, it makes no difference.

I do agree that it would have made more sense to have outlined a plan for growth at least as a framework much much earlier, if for nothing else than to increase business confidence.

The whole thing does seem to be incredibly disjointed and lacking in clarity of vision.

Anyway, shouldnt you be out waving corn dollies at the kids coming home from school telling them the nasty tories are going to end up forcing them to eat the family dog by the summer?

It's a shame that Cameron forgot about the need for growth. He started so well with his proposal for a 'Silicon Valley' in East London. More plans like that please!

Why is it always " The government " that has to come up with a plan for growth ? Maybe our industrialists who want profit can come up with a plan, or the trade unions that demand rewards from inefficient public services , and private industry they blackmail into oblivion ; let's see some ideas from them rather than the present negative rhetoric and demands for what they haven't earned or deserve.

7. englandrise
"Sadly "England" is still a forbidden word in the UK parliament."

I had hoped someone on the last thread might explain this peculiar phenomenon when I commented on it as an outsider.

Have none of you asked your leaders why they have this aversion to saying the word?

Something to cheer us up on a Friday

"The fact that we haven't published a growth plan doesn't mean we haven't got a plan for growth."

Unsurprisingly, the Dragons were unimpressed and Nick, left the Den with nothing. Will the Dragons be more impressed next week when George Osbourne unveils the governments new banking package?

STOP paying so much to the eu its avast amount of money we dont gain any thing at all.the trouble is nick nobody listen to us. CLEGG is to pro europe for my liking .mavis

I don't agree with Nick

#8 I think you'll find that the previous Labour Government actually did well on growth - and in ways which were largely supported by the parties which make up the present Government. It's to the credit of ALL parties that they've realised that the previous model was flawed & are trying to find ways of doing something about it. As they are politicians, there will be a lot of verbiage & spin from all sides. The problem is you need a combination of better education FOR ALL, which fits people to play a role in a globalised economy, rather than be forced to take "McJobs", better training (e.g. apprenticeships), sensible lending by banks (no point in building up a load more bad debts from weak business plans)and encouragement for inward investment. We could also make it more expensive for companies like Pfizer to close down high-tech UK plants by making them pay 2 years Job Seekers Allowance + £50k per worker for retraining on top of any redunadancy payments.
The problems was that the previous model worked - until it broke. Unfortunately it broke badly - and not just in the UK, but in most Western economies. What we need to be seeing now are ACTIONS not words (& a genuine attempt to seek political consensus rather than the stupid & often rabid antagonism which puts people off politics & means that when Governments change we get many changes, most of which either won't work or will turn out to be unnecessary & inconsistent).

11. At 4:23pm on 04 Feb 2011, johnharris66 wrote:

There is a logical problem with determinism (see the paradox in the last sentence of my #248). Or at least there was a logical problem when I last wrote an essay on it.

That's not really a paradox because you've simply introduced another factor into the equation - thus altering the outcome. Had that factor been known then the result of your action could still be determined.

Please, don't tell us you're a fatalist?

Planning!!! Brilliant!!! And to think that, on the last blog, I accused Nick Clegg of not being radical.

jh66 @ 11

Yes, saw that - you and your bottle of beer, doing the opposite etc.

I'm just playing around with an idea here, to be honest, but what I'm saying is no, that's not a logic flaw, it's about incomplete information.

If we really DID know exactly the current map and motion of all particles, and we'd fully solved the quantum aspects around predicting how they will therefore move and collide etc from this point onwards, and given that all thoughts and feelings, behaviour and actions come from this interplay between particles (the brain and body and all aspects of the world being merely a mass of them in space) ... given that complete and perfect knowledge, we'd be able to predict the future for all time and in every respect.

So, say, if I knew it, I would know if you were about to drink the beer or not. Even if I tell you you will beforehand and you, John, want to do the opposite and not drink it (just to be awkward), you won't be able to. Won't be able not to, I mean. I will be, to all intents and purposes, God. I would even be able to tell everyone on the Blog in exactly which decade 3% per annum growth will return to the UK economy, and whether the Lib Dems will manage double digit seats at the next election.

As it is, sadly, I can't.