Nationalisation gives us less, more expensively
Two stories from the press:
Labour has been warned its “skills revolution” to tackle youth unemployment risks failure, after its flagship apprenticeship scheme enrolled only 160 young people in its first eight months.
The shortfall, highlighted in a report by the Fabian Society, leaves the government well off track of achieving its ambition of 30,000 “foundation apprenticeship” starts by the end of this parliament.
As a rough pencil sketch apprenticeships were recently nationalised. What had been the - admittedly imperfect - system of the Little Platoons just getting on with it was killed off and a new, national, scheme was introduced. Large employers no longer apprentice, or not-apprentice, to taste but all pay a fraction of the labour bill as a tax. That tax is then used by those Rolls Royce minds in Whitehall to produce a national apprenticeship scheme. The nationalisation of apprenticeships that is - with the results we can see, fewer apprenticeships at greater cost. Even if we just want to say those promised apprenticeships are just slow, late, in arriving that’s still not a positive advertisement for the nationalisation.
Our second story:
Unions, thinktanks, environmental groups and charities have come together to call on ministers to boost the financial firepower of the national wealth fund to empower it to invest more in Britain and rebalance the country’s economy.
Lower energy bills, the revitalisation of the UK’s industrial heartlands and the provision of more high-quality jobs could all be unlocked by scaling up the NWF, according to a statement from organisations including the TUC, Greenpeace, WWF and the New Economics Foundation.
The statement calls on the government to overhaul the NWF by turning it into a “world-leading national development bank capable of delivering the investment Britain needs”, while insisting this would be consistent with the government’s existing fiscal rules.
Given what we know about nationalisation this is going to produce less investment more expensively. You know, it’s not going to work?
Except that is to misunderstand politics. Whether something works in the more general sense, works for us out here, makes the country richer or summat, isn’t the point. Something works in politics if it means that unions, think tanks, environmental groups and charities have more of our money to spend on what they desire, not what we desire. Yea, even if such spending makes all of us out here poorer it still works in political terms because the insiders now have more to micturate.
Aren’t we the lucky people?
Tim Worstall