CUTS IN business red tape, regeneration of regional cities and support for the industries of the future were announced yesterday by British prime minister David Cameron, who declared that the United Kingdom has the power to decide its own economic destiny if it faces up to the challenges.
Under the plan, one regulation will have to be discarded for every new one created. Ministers will work with particular cities to drive development, backed by the election of powerful mayors.
Mr Cameron was in Leeds,giving his first public speech since entering No 10 at the head of the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition.
“I passionately believe we don’t have to accept things the way they are. Imagine if Germany had given up after the second World War, leaving the bombed-out factories on the Ruhr lying dormant. Imagine if South Korea, after years of war, surrendered to its fate as an economic backwater in the 1950s. Imagine if Margaret Thatcher had seen the British economy in the 1970s, wracked by strikes and deep in debt, and decided just to manage our decline. They said no, we can transform our economy – and they did, turning war-ravaged regions and strike-ruined countries into economic powerhouses,” he said.
“This is my message today: there is no such thing as economic destiny. We can transform our economy. We can turn this around. We make the future ourselves. Instead of controlling business, we will free enterprise.”
Mr Cameron said that transforming the British economy would be the first priority of his government. For years, the country had been heading in the wrong direction. The economy had become unbalanced, “hitched to a few industries in one corner of the country”, while manufacturing was let slide.
Britain, he said, had become over-reliant on welfare “with mass worklessness accepted as a fact of life and around five million people now on out-of-work benefits”. The country had become “increasingly hostile to enterprise, with business investment in the past decade growing at around 1 per cent each year – only a quarter of what it was the decade before. It has become far too dependent on the public sector, with over half of all jobs created in the last 10 years associated. . . with public spending.”
Mr Cameron said the British deficit, “set to overtake Greece”, would need to be tackled immediately. Delay would mean no recovery: it would be “undercut by rising interest rates, rising inflation, falling confidence and the prospect of higher taxes”.
Getting the deficit down would help restrain inflationary pressures, allow interest rates to remain lower for longer and create the space for private sector investment, he said.
“Without sound finances, none of our ambitions will be deliverable. That’s why . . . we have changed the way budgets are written by creating an independent office of budget responsibility and we have launched and completed an in-year spending review to save £6 billion.”
