Monday 16 February 2009

Creeping Socialist Madness

I have noticed a worrying thought line creeping into interviews and comment on the current economic crisis, most recently in this weekend's Observer and this morning's Today programme. The faux logic goes like this (my comments in brackets):

1. It's the banks wot got us in this mess (already flawed from the start)
2. We're all in the shit led by the financial services sector (true)
3. We can no longer rely on the service sector to lead our economy (why? huge leap of logic here)
4. Any economy that does not actually make stuff cannot survive and will always fail (untrue)
5. So what we need is massive investment in manufacturing so that we can once again establish a sensibly balanced economy (bollocks)

This is lefty, union-led, Grauniad nonsense which needs to be challenged.

Our cost of living, employment costs, transport costs etc mean that we will never be able to compete with China, India and the rest, apart from small scale, highly specialist manufacturing where we have specialist or technical know how not available elsewhere.

Lose sight of that and we will be turning the clock back; and then we really are all doomed.

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