Good article and a good starting point.

I have no idea how to save the economy, but like to think that there are other ways to do it than to encourage everyone to go shopping again.

The only problem with the idea of a green economy is defining it properly – it can’t just be big business and giant energy companies running round calling themselves green in order to rise to the top of the capitalist tree again.

It is really not obvious how investment in the “two revolutions” will reduce inequality.

as for immigrants, I don’t know what “getting them paid decent wages so the jobs and livelihoods of the existing workforce cannot be undercut” means, or how you intend to control wages paid to immigrants.

[one might call investing in new sustainable energy technologies and projects "financial speculation" too. let's hope we see more of it. I'd like to see the UK govt throw some money at this]

The problem was quite simply this whole “entrepreneurs” culture that built up in the days of Thatcher. People who had the ability and training were no longer valued, instead, those who could make money from the people who had the ability were. The reason why so few scientists and engineers being trained now is because no one wants to do it. They don’t because they know that there is no money in it. In fact quite the opposite, since our society no longer values scientists and engineers students will be paying for a degree that will be a hindrance.

The old days of going from university and working for one of the big state research organisations (eg CEGB for nuclear research, Rolls Royce for engineering, GPO for telecommunications research etc) are gone. If you are an able and clever scientist but a crap businessman then you will not succeed, but you will still have an expensive degree to pay for. If you are a good businessman, but know fuckall about science then you will succeed.

That is the way that our society is structured. We cannot create millions of jobs just making wind turbines. And before people whine about “green jobs” I suggest you look up things like the pollution caused by copper mining (guess what metal is used in the turbine windings) and look at the huge amounts of CO2 created when manufacturing cement and then curing cement as concrete.

Simon Mair: “We need to fix broken Britain and not by scapegoating immigrants but by getting them paid decent wages so the jobs and livelihoods of the existing workforce cannot be undercut.”

That sentence panders to the far right. Immigrants do not undercut wages. By definition, migrants travel and they go to the places where they are best payed. If migrants swarm on a single place, there will be a surplus of labour and wages will fall, affecting both local and migrant workers. So the migrants move on.

I endorse this message!

@2 Luis Enrique: You had me scared for a moment because I thought you were going to propose investment in something bonkers. Desertec has an element of channel tunnel about it — it’s all logical on paper — with similar risk. But a worthy risk.

When I am next in Andalusia, I’ll hop on the train to find this:
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/

Charlieman

I’d like to see that. If you like that, you may also like http://www.esolar.com/ and interview with founder here http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2248

“does it make poor people richer”

Yes, a good test of an economy or economic policy. and the answer is that yes, the poor have been getting richer in recent decades.

“the government’s own studies show inequalities are worse now”

And that is a very different point. It is entirely possible for the poor to be getting absolutely richer and yet relatively poorer. It’s not just entirely possible, it’s what has been happening.

Don’t confuse the two points.

@7: Thanks, Luis. In the interview with the eSolar founder, these words:
“For renewable energy, about 80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the cost is upfront and there’s no fuel costs and the only cost over the years is operation and maintenance, which is small.”

There is a bit of tough realism in that statement. We, in countries that are indebted, will find it too expensive to get on the renewable energy train. More positively, China has something attractive in which to invest its surplus.

“In the interview with the eSolar founder, these words:
“For renewable energy, about 80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the cost is upfront and there’s no fuel costs and the only cost over the years is operation and maintenance, which is small.””

So the economics are almost exactly like those of nuclear power then?

Charlieman

Don’t confuse the national debt with how much the nation owes to foreigners – much of the national debt is held by domestic investors and constitutes wealth for those persons. If renewable energy is cheaper than the alternatives (which could come about through some combination of tech progress, coal, gas and oil price rises, or price controls & taxes) then it will be profitable, and if it’s profitable then companies will be able to raise the funds. We will not find it too expensive to get aboard the renewable energy train.

We could, however, use some help getting aboard from legislation, and from govt sponsored investments in some of the shared infrastructure that private companies might struggle to supply between themselves, but which once exists may crowd-in private sector investment. I’m thinking of things like distribution infrastructure.

I agree with @3, but add to it: the despising of expertise extends to other work areas in the public sector, so that too frequently I find people in the wrong jobs without any job specific training – and when that is a managerial post, the entire section goes bad. By contrast, recently I was talking to a manager in a care home run by a charity with a religious background – they are absolutely dedicated to hiring the right people and giving them the necessary training – and it is an excellent care home.

@11 Luis Enrique: Debt is debt. Debt does not have a nationality. If you are suggesting that “local” loaners will be more sympathetic to long term schemes, I hope that you are right, mate.

The electric vision: Along route, we have to sort out standards for electric car refuelling (I won’t buy one that will not go non-stop from Leicester to Blackpool at an average of 65 miles per hour) and charge times (8 hours or 8 minutes?). If we assume that a vehicle needs to be recharged every 150 miles, we are going to need a lot of charging points that deliver massive quantities of energy very quickly. Loads of infrastructure. The kids are building electric cars but you can’t go anywhere in them. Coherency?

@10 Tim W: A liberal argument: the UK nuclear industry has its own police force. How do we create trust in civil nuclear energy?

@13: back to the days of the horse, when you rode to the next coaching inn and changed horses – now you will change batteries. No, its not viable for huge numbers of electric cars, of course…

[13] No, Charlieman, Luis is right. My savings are in fixed-interest stocks, i.e. government and corporate debt. According to you I don’t have any savings.

***

More generally.

Targets that are below what the science clearly says we need if we are to minimise the effects of climate change

This is so possibly because there is no such animal – James Lovelock gave a recent interview in which he suggested that not only are there no agreed targets, and not only is there no way to figure out the causes of climate change (i.e. human dereliction vs natural change), but that it would take a much longer time series of data before any of that could be established for sure.

As to investment in research, the simple truth is that other countries do it better, and can always outspend us. Our living standards are going to decline dramatically over the next twenty years, no matter who is in power. Just as in 19th-century Scotland and Ireland, the only sensible course of action for young people in 21st-century Britain is to emigrate. India might be as good a place as any, eh, Sunny and Sunder?

The other wing of the revolution is the green revolution , that started with carbon reduction and is now changing the way people run businesses and live their lives.

Trying to reduce the unpleasant side effects of industry may be a very laudable goal, but it is not one that will make the country richer.

@14 dreamingspire: Not entirely daft, but if we had battery swapping stations we’d need a mega power station to recharge the transplants.

Can we go on to the reliability of Lithium-Ion batteries? Li-ion cells blow up; they burn up in the laptop from your favourite supplier. Have you checked your battery? Don’t bother; there is no way to check.

A laptop computer uses six Li-ion cells; an electric car uses thousands of them. Thousands of nasty unreliable batteries in a motor car. If you are in it, and I hope that you escape, what are you going to do about the half ton of untouchable scrap in the middle of the road?

How do we create trust in civil nuclear energy?

Stop using boo-words such as nuclear. Let’s have civil fission energy instead.

Hydrogen cell electric car might be good investment. As for Nuclear Fission , that isnt that far away. So the future is orangre as long as we don’t nuke Iran.

Mike K
Less doom and more optimism. You would think there was a general election around the corner.
You sound like a sub ed for the Mail.

As for Nuclear Fission , that isnt that far away.

Depends on where you live.

[02] If I were, I’d be rooting for YouKnowWho. Bit I ain’t and I’m not.

I’m all for inventing new futures beyond banking and finance but then I’d also like to know what are we going to do about this – and when?

“Up to 12 million working UK adults have the literacy skills expected of a primary school child, the [HoC] Public Accounts Committee says. . . The report says there are up 12 million people holding down jobs with literacy skills and up to 16 million with numeracy skills at the level expected of children leaving primary school.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4642396.stm

An accessible piece in The Economist for 26 August 2006 showed that Britain is unusually well-endowed with low-skilled young people compared with other European countries:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7843638

I rather suspect the reason we have so many young people working in call centres is because they lack skills to do much more, not because of some big conspiracy to promote London as a global finance centre to the exclusion of the rest of Britain. Young guys with the talent can always become professional footballers and earn up to £100,000 a week.

A watershed in university participation has been reached – for the first time a majority of young women in England are going to university. Provisional figures, showing university entrance for 2008-09, show that 51% of young women entered higher education – up from 49% the previous year. The overall figures also show an all-time high of 45% going to university, including 40% of young men.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8596504.stm

Evidently, we have more smart young women than smart young men.

Poor people are richer than in 1990 and Paul Mason is a Trot sympathiser. Two incontrovertible facts.

Britain dropped out of the ERM in September 1990s and the economy went into a deep recession in 1991 so it’s not too surprising if poor people are better off nowadays:
http://www.bized.co.uk/dataserv/chron/kf90all.htm

I didn’t “like” the Paul Mason piece for BBC Newsnight for many reasons but I’ve little doubt that it has a populist resonance, including a widespread belief that poor job prospects and youth unemployment are due to foreigners coming here to work.

What’s especially worrying IMO is a continuing failure to recognise that our workforce, especially beyond London, the South East and East regions, tends to lack skills which employers can more easily find in other countries.

@4
That sentence does not, or at least was not meant to, pander to the far right. I think I didn’t explain myself clearly. Bosses do try to use immigrant workers to keep wages low, and in some industries this has been successful. One way to combat this is simply to raise the minimum wage to a fairer “living” wage. I.E. one that everyone can comfortably live off. This would stop wages being driven too low.

@8

In the article I did not state whether I was talking about absolute or relative poverty. For this I apologise. However, I was talking about relative poverty, and I believe Mason was as well.

@16
Making the country as rich as possible should not be the primary concern of a government, there is a good deal of research to show that after a certain point increased GDP does not lead to increased life expectancy, better mental health, increased social mobility etc. GDP should increase just enough to maintain high levels of employment.

@3

“They don’t because they know that there is no money in it. In fact quite the opposite, since our society no longer values scientists and engineers students will be paying for a degree that will be a hindrance.”

Not true, people with Science and engineering degrees have some of the highest starting salaries of any degrees.

“In the interview with the eSolar founder, these words:
“For renewable energy, about 80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the cost is upfront and there’s no fuel costs and the only cost over the years is operation and maintenance, which is small.””

Tim Worstall @10:
“So the economics are almost exactly like those of nuclear power then?”

Only if you completely ignore the exit costs of nuclear power (disposal of extremely long-lasting waste, decommissioning and clean-up of sites).

@29: “people with Science and engineering degrees have some of the highest starting salaries of any degrees”

According to this of a year ago as well as several other sources, the highest average graduate salaries go to medics, dentists, chemical engineers, economists, vets and general engineers:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/table-what-do-graduates-earn-1675502.html

Pure science graduates are further down the pecking order and come lower than pay for social work and land and property management.

GDP should increase just enough to maintain high levels of employment.

Indeed. You have probably heard of something called “productivity”.
Thanks to technological progress – of the kind you rightly admire – productivity tends to grow by around 2-3% per year.
So, erm, if demand doesn’t grow by that amount, unemployment will rise.

Economics has never been the Greens’ strong suit, has it?

@31

This http://www.independent.co.uk/student/career-planning/getting-job/starting-salaries-what-the-future-holds-814362.html (also the independent) says

“It certainly pays to be a scientist. The statistics show that eight out of the highest 10 starting salaries go to graduates with science-related degrees. The other categories that do all right are graduates of economics and social work. The average starting salary for economics graduates is £24,466 and for social workers £22,560. Salaries for mathematics graduates are also firmly in the top 20.

It really does make sense to go into engineering, if you have the right A-levels because most engineering degrees lead to well-paid jobs. The aspiring chemical engineer can earn £25,136, and the civil engineer £22,392 in their first job. Engineering is better paid than computer science, widely regarded as a sensible option for those who are interested in technology.”

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29408064/Highest_Paid_Bachelor_s_Degrees_2010?slide=1 says that according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers all the top 10 starting salaries for jobs in the US are science or engineering.

@32: “Economics has never been the Greens’ strong suit, has it?”

We’ve had periodic outbursts of debates about economics here and its not popular with many besides those of Greenish dispositions. Sentiments similar to these evidently have a wide resonance:

“We must not reckon profit and loss according to the book, but only according to political needs. There must be no calculation of cost. I require that you do all that you can and to prove that part of the national fortune is in your hands. Whether new investment can be written off in every case is a matter of indifference.”

In fact, that is a quote from a speech by Goering made in Germany in 1936.
Source: John Hiden: Republican and Fascist Germany (Longman 1996), p.128.

Btw I get a little lost with the number of “industrial revolutions” we are supposed to have had in Britain. Harold Wilson made speeches in the course of campaigning for the 1964 election about: “the Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated measures on either side of industry”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson

I recall hearing that keynote speech for that election as part of a large audience in Leicester and sat next to Anthony King.

HeavyLight @30

Up to a point. The old model of disposal, that of burying waste in the ground for geologically significant periods of time may now be undergoing something of a rethink.

Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue points out in his latest book that work has already begun on the design of fourth generation nuclear reactors which will run on the reprocessed by-products of previous generations of reactors. If that is where we’re at after just 50 years of nuclear development (and allowing for a development gap when the world went anti-nuke and development slowed) imagine the technology we will develop if we keep at it over the very long term.

Plus, if you want a further nuclear good news story, Brand also points out that decommissioned Russian warheads now provide a major source of America’s nuclear fuel.

It’s not a magic bullet but it’s part of the solution

“Brand also points out that decommissioned Russian warheads now provide a major source of America’s nuclear fuel.”

Your factoid of the day is that this was negotiated by Al Gore when he was VP.

@24: “Poor people are richer than in 1990 and Paul Mason is a Trot sympathiser”

I used to wonder about Trotsky’s enduring popularity and then, with reading, I began to understand why.

At one time or another, Trotsky espoused virtually every fashionable ideology going apart from fascism.

At the famous London Conference in 1903 of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Trotsky was a Menshevik, committed to radical social change but by peaceful means, while Lenin promoted the faction advocating social change by violent revolution. This latter faction came to be self-styled the Bolsheviks even though they were in a minority at the Conference. By implication, the other lot were Mensheviks.

Come the October Revolution in St Petersburg in 1917 and Trotsky became a signed up Bolshevik and then the highly successful commander of the Red Army during the course of the ensuing civil war in Russia.

By the time of Stalin’s ascendancy after Lenin’s death, Trotsky had progressed to advocating permanent revolution on a global scale while Stalin was pushing for the more limited goal of securing socialism in one country first.

Exiled to Mexico in 1929, Trotsky underwent a further ideological relocation to a position not too distant from that of Von Mises and Milton Friedman. Hence this peruasive polemic directed at central planning in theSoviet Union:

“If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace—a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions—such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1932/1932-sovecon.htm

Unless, dear reader, you are a really dedicated fascist, Trotsky is bound to be your personal guru because he virtually covered the ideological waterfront at one time or another. That is the explanation for his enduring appeal. He was a man for every season and every fashion.

I quite like paul mason but his recent book on the credit crunch is lightweight and marks him as someone who runs with the herd rather than having many original thoughts. given his job, as a daily news reporter, this is hardly surprising.

However, it should not mean that the rest of us should take his longer-term with a great deal of seriousness. The possibilities of green tech have been around for 5-10 years now so predicting we should be on top of it is hardly revolutionary; indeed, this is one of the few positive strands of the latest Labour budget.

The danger, as I see it, is every few years or so a fashionable ‘trend’ is spotted by some hack, copied (via churnalistic tendencies) by other herd members, becomes the consensus, is turned into half-witted policy, only to be ejected as it fails, after the waste of hundreds of millions, if not billions of pounds.

A few facts help – this country has an open economy, a world-leading financial sector, transacting capital flows for much of the non-US world, the sixth-largest manufacturing industry in the world, with strong market shares in pharma and aeronautics in particular. building on these, rather than insisting on state-directed industry into whatever’s fashionable today, would seem a sensible place to start.

@38 “is turned into half-witted policy”: reminds me of the creation of ICL in the late 1960s: I watched that go downhill.

A casual and uninformed watcher of Paul Mason’s TV programme on Newsnight could reasonably conclude that the government has done little to nothing to promote business development in the regions.

Sadly, that is completely untrue, sufficiently so to raise questions about the quality of Paul Mason’s journalism. In fact, the government has spent billions of taxpayers’ money promoting business development in the regions. Consider just two policy initiatives:

“[Regional Development Agencies] have been an expensive failure. Over £15 billion of taxpayers’ money has been spent over the past nine years, with little discernable impact.”
http://tpa.typepad.com/home/files/structure_of_government_3_the_case_for_abolishing_rdas_e.pdf

“An investment by taxpayers of £74m into regional venture capital funds has been marked down to just £5m according to a report by the Whitehall auditor, which is highly critical of the government’s wider venture capital programme. Since 2000, the Department for Business has invested £338m in 28 venture capital funds – through seven umbrella schemes – that have provided seed money to more than 800 companies. . .

“The Commons’ public accounts committee, in a report published today, finds the funds were structured in a way that taxpayers bore a ‘disproportionate’ share of the risks involved when compared with private sector coinvestors. And while the department has provided ‘scant information’ about the performance of the funds, using ‘restrictive’ confidentiality clauses, it appears that many made annual losses.

“The regional venture capital funds – one of the seven schemes – has reported an interim rate of return of -15.7 per cent, far worse than the -0.4 per cent delivered by other similar European funds.

“Meanwhile, many of the funds have been paying high costs to private sector fund managers. The RVCF, for example, spent £46m in fees against £130m invested up to December 2008.

“The taxpayers’ investment of £74m in the RVCF is now worth just £5m – a drop of about 93 per cent.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/28a340d2-2b1a-11df-93d8-00144feabdc0.html

Guest-
In response to you para -
“We need to fix broken Britain and not by scapegoating immigrants but by getting them paid decent wages so the jobs and livelihoods of the existing workforce cannot be undercut”

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath explains beautifully why the elite promote mass immigration. I would recommend it.

37
I think you’ll find that Trotsky’s enduring popularity is more to do with the fact of his adherence to Marx. Marx stated that socialism could not emerge in isolation and certainly not from the social and economic state of Imperial Russia in 1917.
Trotsky certainly believed that the free-market would eventually result in monopoly capitalism which would lay the foundations for a socialist revolution. Trotsky’s apparent ideological stance, which supported that of Friedman’s, was because it was a step forward towards socialism.
The fall of the Soviet Union is often said (by marxists) to be the result of the soviets attempting to leapfrog history.

@42:

The local difficulty is that Marx had virtually nothing to say beyond a few vague generalities about the route to achieving the goal of Communism, where workers would be working according to their abilities and consume products and services according to need. Quite how enough workers would engage in, say, car assembly or social work to meet expressed needs was never explained.

Lenin filled in the gap, after a fashion, with: The State and the Revolution (1918):
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

By its own formal constitution and state title, the Soviet Union was claimed to be organised along Socialist lines while working towards Communist social arrangements.

As for Trotsky, a suitable quote can be found for almost any ideological position, depending on whether he was in his Menshevik phase, his Bolshevik phase, his permanent world revolutionary phase or up there with Von Mises condemning central economic planning and direction.

@ 29 “Not true, people with Science and engineering degrees have some of the highest starting salaries of any degrees.”

Yes, but most of them aren’t doing “Science” jobs. They go into accountancy, finance, banking. The city is full of people with chemistry and mechanical engineering degrees modelling get rich quick schemes for hedge fund managers and merchant bankers. It’s being able to “do the maths” rather than the science degree per se

43
Yes, it does seem that Trotsky holds different ideological views but he is clearly with Marx, who stated that socialism would emerge from monopoly capitalism. In fact Bolshevics supported the February 1917 revolution with the hope that capitalism would spread throughout Russia, but the chaos which resulted and, of course, many of the peasants simply wanted to return to their previous lives,
eventually led to the October Revolution.
Trotsky was never in favour of central state planning, even though Lenin coined the term ‘war communism’ to signify it’s temporary state. In reality, the sheer problems left by the czar and the upheaval of the war meant that realpolitik prevailed and though Marx was always quoted, what eventually emerged was not marxism (no state, never mind a centrally planned economy)
You are quite correct, Marx did not go into detail about how exchange would take place or how goods would be valued. Trotsky was also aware that his views detracted from both Lenin and Stalin and perhaps he would be safer to hold back, although history shows that he was caught-out in the end.

@44: ” . . It’s being able to ‘do the maths’ rather than the science degree per se”

That’s my impression too. Physicists at one time were complaining bitterly about City institutions tempting away theoretical physicists from academia with offers of big pay hikes.

When the government decided to move the Office for National Statistics from London to Newport in S Wales, quite a few of the statisticians refused to relocate and got themselves jobs with financial institutions in the City, often at better pay.

In 2007, before the onset of the financial crisis, The Economist was saying this:

“The City of London is globalisation in action. It is, first of all, thoroughly international, handling more of the world’s deals in over-the-counter derivatives, global foreign equities, eurobonds and foreign exchange than any other financial centre (see chart 3). Second, its firms specialise in innovative, high-value-added products. Third, the City is living proof that clusters work in the way that economists claim. Capital can move like mercury. The main reason why international finance has made London its home is that everyone is there, making it easier to do complicated deals and to trade quickly in large quantities. The City offers a cluster of talent—financial whizz-kids, lawyers and due-diligence accountants—that is second to none, and self-renewing. It helps that English is a near-universal second language and that London’s time zone makes it possible to trade in a (long) working day with both Asia and America. Regulation is mainly deft but not lax, and the taxman takes a hospitable view of foreigners’ personal earnings.” (subscription barrier)
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8582323

“The other wing of the revolution is the green revolution,” writes Simon Mair.
Right, that could change the economy, the industrial and social fabrics and a way of living too much imported from the US these last decades (the drive-eat-watch model).
But on that Britain is clearly not leading the pack compared to a number of often smaller countries and economies.
As I wrote about it -see http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-from-shipyards-to-wind-turbines-britain-needs-bets-17942.html or http://www.mikeconomics.net/home/mindreading/ (longer version)- Britain has lost its manufacturing edge years ago and has relied excessively on the financial sector. Those two factors diverted resources that could have been used for better purposes.
What’s needed is a British economic reinvention, based on BETS, for business, environmental, technology and social initiatives and enterprises.
The Lib Dems clearly offer a clearer vision and feasible plans to strive for that necessary “greener” economy than the old left and new right alternatives.

That all looks remarkably like central planning to me. . .

Just how would the LibDems in government set about “promoting” BETS businesses?

By putting dollops of taxpayers’ money into venture capital funds perhaps, through capital grants or paying subsidies?

Why should we expect such splendid initiatives to be more successful than the well-intended efforts of the outgoing government to boost business in the regions – see the links posted @40 above?

Forgive, but I do like to know the detail of the policy package before signing up.

From Burton Malkiel: A Random Walk Down Wall Street, on the South Sea Bubble of 1720:

“The prize must surely go to the unknown soul who started ‘A Company for carrying on undertaking of great advantage, but nobody knows what it is.’ The prospectus promised unheard of rewards. At nine o’clock in the morning, when the subscription books opened, crowds of people from all walks of life practically beat down the door in an effort to subscribe. Within five hours a thousand investors handed over their money for shares in the company. Not being greedy himself, the promoter promptly closed up shop and set off for the Continent. He was never heard of again.”

To Bob:
Why should BETTING look and sound as “central PLANNING”? Stimulus, incentives, tax credits et al. Are these about central planning?
Let me take just one example. Britain was a leading country in venture capital across Europe, second only to the US in the 80s and 90s. Then the whole industry moved to what they called “private equity” and entrepreneurs,buyouts or spinoffs were left to their own devices. Then the midcap promises vanished too.
Reinventing venture capital is an absolute priority to enable SMEs to find alternatives or supplements (through leverage) to classic bank loans.
Is that about central planning?

@49: “Is that about central planning?”

No, but this @47 certainly looks like “central guidance”:

“What’s needed is a British economic reinvention, based on BETS, for business, environmental, technology and social initiatives and enterprises.”

What do you think is likely to happen among front line admin people when that “guidance” gets to them in a memo from head office and they are faced by a new business applicant for equity, a loan or a grant? Presumably, they will have some sort of check-box questionnaire to test the applicant for eligibility against the official criteria before they progress to considering whether the business is likely to be commercially viable.

Btw as a broad generality, I certainly favour enterprisimg venture capital but the devil is in the detail.

More than a few have questions about the pension arrangements of the Phoenix Four who bought the Rover Group from BMW for £10 in 2000:
http://www.aronline.co.uk/wordpress/tag/john-towers/

There are questions about the motivation of internal managers of businesses which get taken over in management buy-outs?