LABOUR FLANNEL

In an article in the Daily Mail entitled, ‘Enterprise: the only way we can compete with China and India’, written by Gordon Brown, the Labour Chancellor and prime minister in waiting, starts off as follows:

‘Few can doubt that Britain’s post-war history of economic decline - when we suffered high unemployment, poor educational standards and low levels of business creation - arose from a poverty of aspirations.

For too many young people the British work ethic was insufficiently strong, the ambition to learn too weak, the enterprise ethic too narrowly held. For decade Britain - the home of the creative genius of the industrial revolution - had no-go areas for enterprise ...

Move forward to Britain’s Enterprise Week 2005 which moves into top gear today, with enterprise master classes, business placements and work experience for young people.

Competitions which did not even exist a few years ago abound, for the British Entrepreneur of the Year, Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the Daily Mail’s Enterprising Young Brit, the Enterprise Area of the Year, the inner-city Fastest Growing Company and the Most Enterprising School of the Year.

All of these - alongside two highly-rated television programmes, The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, which I will be visiting today - signal a vision of Britain where there should be no ceiling on talent, no limit to potential, and no cap on aspiration.

The message is being sent around the world of a Britain that is breaking from a past of low ambitions, a Britain that now seeks to encourage challenge and inspire young people to make the most of their talents and be all they can be.’

And:

‘We know that only those advanced industrial countries that encourage the skills, inventiveness and creative talents of the young will meet and master the challenge from Asia.’

It would be truly horrifying if Mr Brown actually believed this. But given the article’s timing to coincide with Enterprise Week 2005, it might be put down to being a lot of flannel.

As if Britain’s demise from being the first industrial nation and the world superpower ‘arose from a poverty of aspirations’! As if young people did not want to be successful and wealthy. As if the millionaire lifestyle was something they were not interested in.

Even after the Second World War, despite our semi-bankrupt status, we were still a world power both economically and politically. Although, unlike Germany and Japan, we did not recover from the Second World War. We just went downhill.

According to Mr Brown, this decline had nothing to do with the blind adherence to free trade, or loss of empire and the captive markets. Nothing to do with socialism and the accompanying nationalisation of the staple industries, which proved so disastrous.

Nothing to do with the restrictive union practices, the demarcation lines, wildcat strikes, work to rules, 3 day weeks, closed shops etc. Nothing to do with the adherence to the discredited Keynesian economic policies with the ever burgeoning government spending and indebtedness. The reflation and following inflationary spirals. The Stop/Go era and forced devaluations after a failed fixed exchange rate policy.

Nothing to do with the price controls, wage controls, going rates, pay norms etc.

It apparently had nothing to do with the class war politics and the politics of envy [of which Mr Brown was an advocate]; the tax rates of up to 98%; the steady drift towards the desired revolution, with communists deliberately disrupting the economy and society; those who Margaret Thatcher described as ‘The Wreckers’; or the Winter of Discontent.

No. According to Mr Brown, Britain’s decline ‘arose from a poverty of aspirations’. And the solution to that ‘poverty’ [a favourite socialist word] and the means by which we will now compete with countries such as India and China, is lots of gimmicks and competitions.

Maybe we should be thankful he has not cited ‘Big Brother’.

Or perhaps that would be too close to home.