Bill Carmichael: Set firms free to lead revival of North

You have a shiny new policy to announce, the Press are alerted and workers in a factory in Yorkshire are dragooned into listening to you drone on to provide a backdrop for the TV cameras that makes you look both down to earth and dynamic.

And then what happens? Well, someone points out that the statistics you’ve used to back up your new policy are two years out of date and are contradicted by more recent figures. Oops!

Then no sooner has your speech been rapidly re-written than the boss at the factory tells the Press that your carefully laid plans will result in a “bureaucratic nightmare”. Cue despair.

Poor old Ed Miliband! Nothing seems to go right for the Labour leader whose lead in the opinion polls shrinks with each passing week, and with just 10 months to go to the next general election.

And it does make you wonder if Miliband and his team can’t organise a simple photocall at an air conditioning factory in Leeds this week without it descending into farce, what chance have they of running the country?

But despite the fact Miliband got the statistics about the numbers of jobs created in the South East compared to the North entirely wrong, he does have a point about the North-South divide.

We do have a serious imbalance in the UK economy with a disproportionate amount of wealth and jobs created in the south-east, with the rest of the country, including the North, lagging well behind.

But Miliband’s solution is typically statist and bureaucratic.

He wants the current local authorities to collect £30bn worth of business rates from companies in the North and then hand over the cash to a whole new layer of regional bureaucracy – called Combined Authorities – that will invest it in infrastructure projects and skills training.

It sounds like a recipe for creating waste. Under Miliband’s plan as the pile of cash is shuffled from the desk of one pen pusher to the next, it will grow ever smaller. By the time each layer of public sector jobsworths have taken a slice, we’ll be lucky to see any benefit at all.

No wonder that Clive Parkman, managing director of Airedale International in Rawdon, where Miliband announced the policy, described it as a “bureaucratic nightmare”.

Here’s a suggestion; if we want to boost companies in the North why not simply allow them to keep more of the wealth that they create, instead of inventing ever more layers of bureaucracy to dream up ways in which to waste it?

In other words the way to stimulate a real, sustainable northern revival is through radical tax cuts. Governments, both national and regional, only know how to spend wealth created by others, not how to create it in the first place.

So how about business rate reductions for small and medium companies in the North, or a new, lower rate of corporation tax for companies based outside the South East, or a National Insurance holiday for new jobs created in the North?

Companies in the South East or from abroad looking to expand might be tempted by a business-friendly tax regime in the North of England.

Here in Yorkshire we have no shortage of innovators and entrepreneurs. The way to revive the North is get governments and bureaucrats off their backs and let them get on with what they good at – creating wealth.

No equivalence

The conflict in Israel is portrayed in the western media as “tit for tat” or a “cycle of violence”.

This is nonsense. There is no moral equivalence between Islamist terrorists who are trying to kill civilians, and the Israeli defence forces that are trying to protect them.

The terrorists abduct and murder three teenage Jewish boys, and the Israeli army goes into the West Bank to find them. Hamas fires missiles from Gaza at civilian targets in Israel and Israeli warplanes destroy the missile factories. These things are not the same.

And don’t forget this is a world-wide conflict. If the knuckle-dragging bigots who run Hamas and other terror gangs weren’t killing Jews, Christians, Hindus or Chinese atheists, they would be quite happy murdering fellow Muslims – as is happening every day in Syria, Iraq and Libya.