by Hugh Golbourne

The small to medium sized businesses that I work with around the UK will have been more than a little confused to hear about David Cameron’s declaration of war last weekend on civil servants within his own government departments. The so called “enemies of enterprise” who are holding back entrepreneurs through red tape – for example, long winded procurement and planning processes.

It is not that Cameron is wrong to have pointed the finger at his civil servants. He is certainly right to identify them as the people who are holding back the economy. However, he is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It is well known to all – except, it seems, to the man who lives next door – that the treasury has been captured by its senior civil servants. Graduates of the Chicago school of economics and the very product of the baby boomer generation, they assume that the British economy can continue to grow exponentially, regardless of global competition and Britain’s slide down the table of world powers over the past 60 years. (more…)