“Why the Olympic Games mean we should support my politics” is already a sizeable genre, as Chris Brooke pointed out, quoting Daniel Davies in plausibly deniable mode. However, one of the very few pieces in this line that is worth reading is this one by Will Hutton, using the British Olympic team as an exemplar for the institutions-first industrial policy today’s kids are going wild for…well, at least the TUC, the Labour Party, and for that matter the CBI.
Of course, a lot of people on the Left and even quite a few on the right and for that matter Vince Cable have been going on about this stuff for years, notably Hutton. Don’t get stuck next to him at a party. But the Olympics piece is one of the very few I’ve seen that actually gets it across, and as such I recommend it.
If Ed Miliband isn’t an idiot, he’ll play up the point that every interest group in town suddenly loves the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. With few notable exceptions. The only politician, businessman, or trade unionist worth having who doesn’t agree with Will is of course the man best placed to stop anything like this happening, George Osborne.
So perhaps Bryan Gould was right about the 1987 Policy Review. And I should really read up about the Labour eurosceptics (this being a point of Tom Barry’s) – not so much for the euroscepticism as for their take on City/wider economy politics.
Whatever happens, there’s clearly a bit of work to do, via Tom Watson on Twitter.
The Portuguese Development Agency offered a 45 per cent subsidy on the total cost of investment in new weaving technology, developed by Brintons, while the best Britain could offer was 10 per cent through the Regional Growth Fund [and that only next June].
There is of course a criticism here that this is just the politics of productivity, and a lot of the stuff about “reforming British capitalism” tastes of filler (who wants to reform British socialism?) but then, it’s not like we’re swimming in good ideas.
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