Nice idea jase158, but I suspect someone would put a spanner in the works by grabbing the opportunity to increase their profits.
I firmly believe (always have and always will) that the best way for Britain to get itself out of the brown stuff is to turn this country into a fertile land that enables industries to grow from the bottom up.
Britain has been set up to attract the rich on the basis that if the wealthier get wealthier then that must be good for the little people down on the ground, and its a philosophy that has failed abysmally.
The over-focus on service industry has led to the Starbucks scenario, i.e. people being paid the minimum wage, many of them needing to claim state benefits in order to survive on such low income, and then the cheeky beggars raking it in slide out of paying their taxes.
The media constantly spotlight people who claim benefits in order to keep those who make fortunes while they sleep in the shadows.
The thing that is currently crippling Britain is that good old capitalist nice little earner called: 'interest'!
It's not just the money that was borrowed to bail out the bankers that is dragging us down, the problem becomes bigger everyday because of the interest being piled up on the debt day by day.
While this capitalist’s bonanza makes the lenders enormous fortunes while they sleep (how many documentaries have you seen about that?) small businesses in this country are being starved of the working capital they need to expand, or even to keep going in some cases.
Privatisation of the Public utilities has been a disaster for this country, the domestic consumer, and industry are now being ripped of by six companies who share a monopoly between them. Having boasted of their enormous profits over many years, they now tell us that we will have to pay even more for our energy because they have fail to invest past profits in developing energy sources for the future. The watery industry has become a joke with hosepipe bans after a few days of sunshine in the summer months, and unnecessary flooding in the winter due to poor drainage when we get heavy rain. However, no matter how much rain we get in the winter months there will always be hosepipe bans because the people responsible let it leak away through ill-maintained pipe work, which combined with not updating reservoir size with growth of populations, means that these industries can continually bang the drum for water meters so they can rip-off people off even more by charging for the stuff that falls out of the sky by the litre.
The bottom line is that all of the political parties in Britain over the past 30 years have followed an economic plan based on self-interest and the idea that Britain can be a healthy economy by following policies of: "rip-off your neighbour" while ignoring the bigger picture.
New Labour based their economic policy on this perverse version of Keynesian economics, and stood by and watched as what was left of British industry after the Thatcherite years slid into oblivion. They seem to believe that Britain could prosper from a casino/ coffee-shop culture where the doors were thrown open to make Britain a safe-harbour for those who make fortunes while they sleep. The rest is history.
Britain's future now rest in the very unsafe hands of three college boys: Ed, Nick, and Dave. I'm not religious, but I have started praying!
I’ve never been a devotee of Michael Heseltine, but have to admit that he’s now one of the few people who seem to have some idea of expanding Britain’s wealth instead of constantly slashing and burning the various structures that support working people. The other person who seems to have some idea is Vince Cable, however, it seems that too many of the great British public have been duped into thinking that industry is a thing of the past in Britain to take any notice of them.
We need to put a complete ban on half-witted politicians tripping over to American only to return with another no-brainer idea for screwing up the British way of life, and start looking at the ways in which Germany has sustained it’s industries, and it would make sense to start taking a few leaves out of China’s industrial/ economic policies, who ironically in many ways, are doing what Britain once did.
Create work (more industry) that supports prosperity, train people properly, pay a living wage, and the number of people on benefits will shrink rapidly, and we will all be better off.
I found your post heartening jase, because it was good to read something that gave some thought to other people instead the more usual me, me, me, self-interested stuff that is so common these days.
