David Cameron's "enemies of enterprise" speech of a few days ago really depressed me, as it shows what a right wing ideologue we have running the country. It rolled out the same tired Tory lines that government is simply paprasitic on the private sector. It ignores that obvious value of public services like the NHS, education transport and so on in order to pretend the entire public sector accomplishes nothing. What is really amazing though is that he is still blamed regulation, and pretending it has no useful role.
Did he not notice that the financial crisis and the consequent economic disaster were created by banks that took unsustainable risks because nobody was regulating them effectively? Failing that, does he not remember other cases where an industry held its supposed regulator in thrall, e.g. the farming industry prior to the BSE crisis? He seems just to be recycling thatcherite dogmas without any reference to reality.
He also made quite a misleading point about public sector procurement, suggesting that it is simply a set of meaningless rules. In fact a lot of the procurement rules are (a) about securting value for money (b) driven by European regulations that are intended to open up the European Union for Free Trade, which Mr Cameron is upposed to favour. Simply wishing them away is not a serious option.
More sensible would be to do what Brent Council has been doing with the Civic Centre; Training smaller firms in how to bid for contracts within the procurement rules. But of course Mr Cameron wouldn't want to know about that, as it is an example of the "enemies of enterprise" actively helping the private sector.
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