Theresa May’s chief of staff Nick Timothy lives in a parallel world. He’s once again taken to his column for The Telegraph with an appeal for Britain to start manufacturing more and to re-industrialise so that we are less reliant on foreign suppliers and even foreign investors. It is as if de-industrialisation was an unfortunate accident rather than the continuation of a century or more of decline capped by deliberate policy choices of the Thatcher government. We thought The City fat cats would save us if we only slashed regulation in the financial ‘big-bang’ and paid them a king’s ransom or, in many cases, several Kings' ransoms.
His column is titled: Britain doesn’t make enough. We need to reindustrialise to compete
Of course, he is stating the blindingly obvious. We do need to make more things, but the only real growth industry in Britain is in think tanks and bodies producing reports like the one on which his article is based: A Conservative Economy -Building a fairer and more productive nation, by Gavin Rice & Nick Timothy with a foreword by none other than Michael Gove.
It's published by UKonward, a Tory right wing think tank that styles itself as centre right but I'm not convinced anybody in today's Conservative party is on the centre right. .
The 137-page report is a restatement of the problems faced by the UK. Poor productivity, huge inequality, lack of investment, and so on, and so on. It could have been churned out by AI.
Gove, who has been in and out of government at the highest level since 2010 says the report, "lays out a vision for a radical, reformed approach towards British economic policy. It makes an invaluable contribution to the conversation we need to have about Britain’s next steps forward. I look forward to the debate it will stimulate."
In a few days, it will gather dust even if anybody bothers to wade through it all in the first place, and in that fate it will join the dozens and dozens of previous reports all more or less calling for the same thing. The authors of these fruitless reports all seem to think that all we need is to discover the right economic policies and suddenly all will be well. It's as if they believe there is a magic formula that has somehow eluded us for a century or more, over countless chancellors of both left and right.
Other countries are more productive, more prosperous, and less unequal despite many changes in economic policies over decades. Do they think Germany hit upon the right policies in 1946 and has stuck to them ever since? What about Japan or South Korea?
One might conclude there is no connection between economic success and economic policies because there probably isn't, although that hasn't prevented groups like UKonward continuing to think there is.
To appreciate the depth of the problem doesn't even take much imagination. The answer is being played out in front of us at this very moment. First of all, let's take the current issue with Brexit. We can't even properly organise our own border checks. Eight years after the referendum, four years after we formally left the EU, and three years after the TCA came into force, we finally managed to get around to implementing post-Brexit checks on some medium and high-risk goods arriving from the EU.
The charges were only announced last month and last week, the FT claimed that to avoid disruption the number of checks to be carried would be set to zero. ITV’s business editor Joël Hills confirmed this is what’s happening with 100s trucks being simply waived through even though the paperwork was incorrect.
Last night the government's IT system which handles these shipments IPAFFS (Import of products, animals, food and feed system) fell over and stopped working.
Oh dear, Day 2 of new post-Brexit border checks and the government’s IPAFFS has crashed.EU imports have to be logged on IPAFFS to clear customs.Went down 2 hours ago. Until it’s up again there are 2 options: 1) wave all lorries into UK. 2) send them to a Border Control Post. pic.twitter.com/hZCwWmfLqs— Joel Hills (@ITVJoel) May 1, 2024
DEFRA denies this but says some users have had 'issues'
Next, just tune in any day to the Horizon inquiry to hear tales of men and women at every level in the Post Office and Fujitsu and in several high-profile legal firms who have been promoted way beyond their own capabilities You might even say that the combination of PO and Fujitsu was a marriage of incompetence.
Do we think these are isolated cases? Are DEFRA, the Home Office, the Post Office, and Fujitsu just terribly unfortunate in recruiting staff who were uniquely not up to the job?
Or is it part of a much deeper malaise that has little or nothing to do with the economic levers in Whitehall? I suggest it's the latter.
