Something at the ASI. Abolish the DTI.
Timmy Elsewhere
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“Abolish the DTI”
That will please the EU Commission in Brussels – there will be no one in government in Britain to monitor and assess the Commission’s trade policy and drop spanners in the works unless, of course, the plan is to transfer trade policy monitoring and spanner dropping to another government department, such as the Treasury. The Treasury would like that.
What of Science and R&D Policy and monitoring, advising on and enforcing technical standards. The Treasury again?
And Energy Policy? The DTI is assessing the option of nuclear power. The Treasury once more?
And Space Policy? Remember Lord Sainsbury desperately waiting for news about Beagle 2 in December 2003?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3366499.stm
In the early 1990s, someone had the brilliant notion of standardising across the EU the plugs for domestic electric appliances and electric lamps. Consider the huge savings there would be from scale economies in manufacturing and fitting electric plugs in Europe and the gains from reducing trade barriers. All very plausible and you can bet that resonated with many Europhiles. There was only one minor impediment: in Britain, the present ringmains standard here – which is relatively safe because the three-pin plugs include fuses to prevent overloading – would have to be scrapped and all premises would have to be rewired, a mere passing consideration when EU harmonisation is at stake. Another Euro harmonisation proposal bit the dust.
There was yet another brilliant idea from the EU Commission in the early 1990s – a *mandatory* standard for *analogue* HDTV, proposed just before *digital* satellite broadcasting took off. Naturally, the ever Europhobic UK vetoed that – and stopped the EU going up a technical blind alley.
In the late 1980s into the mid 1990s, there was a fiercely active lobby for spending taxpayers’ money on serving all premises with a fibre optic cable so everyone could have broadband and the have-nots wouldn’t all miss out on on the prospective digital revolution. That seemed really appealing and the cost estimates a mere snip, initially at £10 billion rising to £20 billion in the money of those times. How well I remember a few of us thinking that the upgrading of standard telephone landlines with ADSL would be quite adequate for most domestic and SME broadband needs. Naturally, we were stamped on for being silly and irresponsible but that is exactly what we now have. What ever happened to that lobby for the fibre optic cabling? What ever happened to the £10 to £20 billions of taxpayers’ money that got saved?
A few of us even thought ten years ago that joining the Euro wasn’t a good idea and said so online – echoes of which still rumble on. Naturally, that was officially considered ridiculous too. And then the Treasury (bless ’em) arrived at that same conclusion in 2003.
I’ve still fond memories of a lively public debate with a ranked professor across the floor of a conference in the run up to the 1992 election on whether Britain should have an industrial policy – just like Japan’s. Those were dangerous times – the said professor was rumoured to be the likely chief economic adviser in the DTI had Labour won that election – with Brian Gould as the incoming DTI minister. Fortunately or otherwise, Sheffield ran a rally in one of its new sports stadiums just a few days before the 1992 election and killed off Labour’s chances:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/447397.stm
Neat timing that. The truly fascinating thing is that industry policy or not, from 1992 Japan’s economy stagnated through the rest of the 1990s whereas Britain’s, after famously dropping out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992, did better than the other major European economies in terms of growth and unemployment, all without an industry policy.
Those were times when a few Labour Party members still believed in real socialism. Even during the run up to the 1997 election, I was engaging in several online debates about Japan’s industrial policy and whether Britain ought to have one too. If socialism had become less fashionable by then, corporatism certainly hadn’t.
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