Be seeing you!

The Government recently announced a number of policies to help British businesses.

They have launched the updated and overhauled businesslink.gov.uk website. This is now the primary gateway for businesses, of whatever scale, seeking support and information from the Government. It’s backed by a new telephone contact centre and many thousands of new business mentors.

They have launched a new nationally-delivered Manufacturing Advisory Service to help small and medium-sized manufacturers to grow. It is estimated that this will help generate £1.5 billion in economic growth. For more information, click here.

The Government continue their goal of cutting red tape with the extension of the Primary Authority Scheme. This allows businesses spanning local authority boundaries to nominate a particular authority under whose regulatory regime they will operate. In addition,  it will offer clearer, more straightforward guidance – so that businesses, particularly SMEs, have greater access to comprehensive guidance on what they need to do to comply. It is hoped this will create a more accountable and transparent system of local regulation and a simpler regulatory landscape.

The Make it in Great Britain campaign is aimed at transforming outdated opinions of UK manufacturing. Business Secretary, Vince Cable, said:

I want our most passionate manufacturers, whether that’s ‘captains of industry’ or those just starting out in their careers, to be our industry champions. With their help, we can modernise people’s views of manufacturing and dispel the myth that ’we don’t make anything in the UK anymore.

In Europe, despite the present instability, my colleague Mark Prisk is focusing on reducing European regulation by pressing EU officials and MEPs to follow the UK’s lead.

My colleague Douglas Carswell has been rather scathing about the Government’s progress. His post here, reminds me to ask economist David B Smith whether he believes we have moved beyond New Labour’s system, which he described as ”an economic approach that was functionally hard to distinguish from that of fascism.”  I’d certainly like to hear from businesses which believe what the Government are doing is a great help and indeed those which don’t.

I look forward to hearing the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement on 29 November. I wish I could believe it will include those measures which would be in everyone’s long term interests: worthwhile bank reform, comprehensive deregulation of business and a sufficient acceleration of the deficit reduction strategy to enable tax cuts…

Related reading:

• Schiff and Schiff, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes: Two Tales of the Economy
• Mises, Bureaucracy (PDF, buy), The Causes of the Economic Crisis (PDF, buy) and Economic Freedom and Interventionism (online, buy)
• Kirzner, How Markets Work: Disequilibrium, Entrepreneurship and Discovery
• More

Via Future Conservatism | Conservative Home.

The three economic dragons: Britain faces much more than a debt challenge. Through no fault of their own Cameron and Osborne have inherited three historic economic challenges: massive levels of personal and government debt; the Eurozone crisis; and the long-term rise of China, India and other emerging economies. Taken together these challenges threaten to make the British economy dangerously uncompetitive in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, for the FT (£), the Prime Minister writes:

Today, I found myself standing by the exit into the aye lobby for the state opening of Parliament. The text of the Queen’s Speech, for which I was lucky to be able to enter the House of Lords, may be found here:

The Queen, seated on the Throne and attended by Her Officers of State, commanded that the Yeoman Usher should let the Commons know that it was Her Majesty’s pleasure that they attend Her immediately in this House.

When they had come with their Speaker, Her Majesty was pleased to speak as follows:

“My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, my Government’s legislative programme will be based upon the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility.

The first priority is to reduce the deficit and restore economic growth.

Read more.

Afterwards, I was delighted to discover my office allocation: windowless, but not shared, for which I am grateful. Now looking forward to the debate on the Speech and beginning the real business of fixing the nation’s finances, getting the economy going, reforming public services, encouraging individual and social responsibility, reforming Parliament, restoring trust to politics and, finally for the moment, restoring freedoms and civil liberties.

We can say this for Labour: they have not made our task boring.

Via The Telegraph:

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has pleaded with his MPs and voters to allow him to concentrate on fixing the fragile British economy if he becomes Prime Minister rather than having “a massive Euro bust up” over the Lisbon Treaty.

Many of us with an international perspective on human cooperation have strong, principled objections to a government that cannot be dismissed at the ballot box. However, David Cameron is right: the clear and present threat to the livelihoods of British people is the state of the economy, not the EU. And George Osborne is right: we need an economy based on save and invest.

Consider the analysis provided by my Cobden Centre colleague, Ewen Stewart:

Equity Strategist Ewen Stewart makes the case that the national debt will within 5 years be over £150,000 per family of 4 with debt repayments of twice the present defence budget, up from £31 billion in 2008/9 to £70 billion in 2013/14. He explains the root causes of our difficulties and indicates a route to recovery.

It’s all over. What a fuss about nothing. The economy will soon be growing again and, look, the FTSE100 is up almost 50% since the March low. Even house prices, according to the Halifax, have risen 6 months in a row. The doom mongers were wrong. Central Banks and Keynesian public spending programmes, together with QE, have worked. Brown indeed has saved the world!

Well that would be one interpretation and a very short sighted one too, for this recovery shows all the hallmarks of a drug addict who claims to be going straight injecting a further mighty dose of the substance that has caused such decay in the first place to prolong the party.

The problem is that the underlying fault lines in the UK economy remain and, thanks to the Government’s response, are even more pronounced.

I thoroughly recommend the entire article: Happy days are here again? Another view from the City » The Cobden Centre.

We simply cannot allow ourselves to slip and let Labour retain power. Everyday British people cannot afford a hung Parliament. We must win strongly and deal with the most urgent and important problem before us: a wrecked economy.

We cannot escape our fate by sticking with Labour’s insensible reactionary fear. We must think.

We cannot keep creating new money: it would eventually destroy the economy completely¹:

Continuously injecting additional amounts of money where it creates temporary demand, together with an expectation of continuously rising prices, draws labour and resources into use in areas which will last only as long as the supply of new money. These policies bring about not so much a raise in the level of employment, but a distribution of employment which cannot last and which eventually can only be maintained by ruinous levels of inflation.

We cannot keep borrowing from future generations: it is just plain wrong and the markets would stop us.

We cannot grow a healthy society by simply seizing the wealth of one and giving it to another. Try doing that with your children’s sweets: you will get little more than screaming, sobbing and tearful mumbling. It is a dead end.

Ewen’s article sets out his policy prescriptions. The way out is the grown-up way: working, saving and investing.

So here is the greatest danger this country faces: a Labour government of childish fantasists who know nothing about creating real prosperity and everything about appearing strong before the camera. They are failing us all: it is tragic.

As my friend Chris Neal — a man with a big heart for the poor and CEO of charity GB Job Clubs — has written of Labour, bringing Cromwell up to date:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of our democracy, and defiled by your practice of top down government; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country to the Brussels federalists for a mess of pottage and a title; and like a Judas betray your Queen and country for a few pieces of money; is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you?

Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more sense of democracy than my horse; you have sold our Gold; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for the whips? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d Parliament into a den of impotent lickspittles, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do; I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place; go, get you out! Make haste!

Ye venal slaves be gone, not to Brussels by Eurostar but to your shires to beg the forgiveness of the people you purport to represent! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

Further Reading

• Moral Markets and Honest Money
• Prices and Production
• Huerta de Soto, Jesús: “Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles”

1. See The pretence of knowledge which explains how economists come to make astrologers look good. [↩]

The hope of avoiding crushing debt and of fixing our society:

David Cameron has called on the Prime Minister to call an election and let the people of Britain decide what we want for our economy.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, David spoke about the “clear choice that is emerging in British politics” on the economic problems facing the country.

read more | digg story