Like many tiny businesses or self employed individuals, we make use of a lady who does the books. Our lovely bookkeeper turned up in a right panic yesterday morning. The reason? She has discovered that she now has to register as a bookkeeper. She has to read an absolutely incomprehensible guide to do so and fill out half a million forms. If she's in any way unsure about the need to register she can apply for, and be charged another small fortune for, a test. The test will tell her if she does need to register but not definitively if she doesn't. She has to sign complex anti money laundering informant promises she doesn't understand. She has to formally notify the authorities of the names and details of each and all her clients (they are all micro businesses) and has to pay a fee of £95 for the right to be registered and, naturally, inspected as the bookkeeper of each and every one of them. She's not sleeping well.
Yup. It's the enterprise economy.
If this were an isolated example of this kind of administrative complexity that would be one thing. But it isn't. There are countless examples. Most of employment law. Most of Health and safety regulations. If this government can find a way to tie everything for running small (and I imagine, larger) businesses up in red tape, add bureaucracy, rules and regulations and generally screw things up, they'll do it.
Oh, and if you are mad enough to try and actually make a go of it, they'll tax you half to death (and, thinking about it, actually beyond the grave too) to pay for all of their self serving, nonsensical interventionist crap.
Grrrr.
My advice to anyone wanting to start their own business? Emigrate.
But I think the root of it is this: we have career politicians running the country. Largely, they have no real contact with the enterprise economy; no real personal experience of entrepreneurialism. Hence, when they reach for solutions, those that come naturally and most easily to hand come from their own frame of reference - that of cumbersome, overburdened processes and procedures. The longer they spend in politics and the more senior they get, the worse is this syndrome.
And............... (one for the cynical) .......... enlargement of the state is a route to a huge potential tame vote bank, and therefore to the only thing these people are really interested in - self protection and the prolongation of their own "power".
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Much sympathy with the point of view Henry, and the analysis - I would just shift your aim a little to focus more fully on the real culprits; civil servants (civil masters would be more accurate to the way they behave...) after all the politician asks them for analysis and solutions and policy direction and the actual power to do lies in their hands and it would not be in their own interests to actively dismantle or reduce state involvement - that could reduce demand for civil servants God forbid. Both the career politician and the civil servant are bereft of commercial experience and on the whole have never added any value to anything in their lives..but even politicians with commercial nous are frustrated by the machinations of the Mandarins and others - a case in point was the fuss made by Digby Jones after a spell seconded to be a Government Minister for trade. The gist of what he said was that his experience of Senior Civil Servants was that they were interested only in a successful individual career above all else - including any useful outcome from their work... I know at first hand having joined the jolly Gov. bandwagon at one point as a Civil Servant and being effectively proscribed by the brotherhood because I achieved something useful.... oops.(long story - I left).
ReplyDeleteLong, but nice David.
ReplyDeleteArchie Norman is another proof of your idea, resigning as an MP because he felt it was impossible in that role to make any kind of a difference.
Glad to know you are reading.