Spend £400m to create long-term UK growth

Like all those that have gone before them over the past 30 years, the £1.4bn regional growth fund will do little to build a vibrant and sustainable economy. The reason – it is another quick fix solution put forward by Whitehall and the Government’s economic advisers that is doomed to failure.

Any sixth-form economics student will tell you that the primary driver of growth is demand. Without demand there is no growth. It is as simple as that.

Therefore, the £1.4 bn would be better invested in a long-term growth strategy that creates demand and leads to somewhere really positive in the future for the British people. For to date I have not seen a single sustainable economic improvement implemented by Government over the last three decades that has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Not one.

Unfortunately politicians and their advisers are always locked into short-term fixes and these, due to lack of foresight and minimal time-scales, never succeed. The money predominantly goes down the drain eventually.

What government should be putting in place is a long-term national economic strategy based upon simple common sense. This country is the most creative nation in the world by far. Until Government place our “independent” inventors and innovators at the forefront of our economic policy, so that they can come up with the world-changing products and technologies, we shall continue in perpetual economic decline.

Now is therefore the time to spend £400m in the UK on our creative infrastructure, and by building eight strategically-located centres of excellence for our independent thinkers.

Get the world-changing ideas first, I say, and then let our world-class universities and industries (what’s left of them) produce the next level of technologies and products that we and the world want to buy.

Then we would really be thinking in terms of a sustainable economy – built on demand. One which simply could not fail.