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Let’s all sell clothes-pegs to gypsies

By Clark Nida

HM Treasury’s “The Plan For Growth” (ISBN 978-1-84532-842-9) makes terrifying reading.

It says in effect “Our financial sector has relocated all our manufacturing business overseas to slave economies because they work for less pay, which has suited their short-term profits. Now that the barrenness of this policy has been exposed by near-financial collapse, we need to turn ourselves into a slave economy to lure it back. So we’re going to invite all manner of carpetbaggers to plunder the nation, and we see it as our job in government to tear down everything standing in their way.”

This isn’t Thatcher – it’s Albert Speer.

Government planning for “growth” is making no distinction between what businesses should be allowed to grow and what should not. The effect will be to encourage the coarsest weeds to grow unchecked and so stifle the precious, productive trees in our garden of England.

This means our town centres, among other things, as relaxed planning controls allow monster supermarkets to plunder the countryside and strangle choice in our daily shopping.

Already the government’s reckless impoverishment of ordinary people by taking billions out of the economy has led to the collapse of several significant retail businesses in Whitby alone. What sort of “growth” will appear in their place?

Undergrowth, if we’re lucky. Mildew and rot if we’re not.

Thanks to poor controls on businesses like banks and other financial services, austerities in the chicken-run may well be unavoidable. But why are we entrusting the job to the foxes?