You can put up all the investment charts in the world, but Britain will sink without trace...

 ...because it cannot understand two simple words:
RESPONSIBILITY & CONSEQUENCES

By John Ward:  There’s a piece by Jürgen Maier in today’s Torygraph on the subject of making Britain a more attractive place in which to invest. Given that our political class seems to be tumescently keen to sell everything to everyone while allowing every tax fiddle in the book if you’re Big and Multinational, it struck me as an odd piece: divorced from reality in a robotic way, and suggesting another in the never-ending series from neoliberals about Britain being Open for Business blah blah blah. Boris Johnson, the ghastly Michael Fallon, Lord Green and dozens of other corporatist control freaks still at large have been giving us the same bollocks for years now.

But it is the British blindness at all levels that nobody from either here or abroad seems able to diagnose and then cure. The challenged primary sense involves two 100% correlated factors: personal accountability, and the consequences of not accepting such responsibility.

The Left of course would have us believe that the only examples of this are the banks, tax evaders, neoliberal political and business figures privatising everything, corrupting Party donators, the right-wing media, foreign military adventurism, and greedy employment deregulation turning rapidly into slavery.

Or put another way, the Left doesn’t accept any responsibility for any of that.

The Right is merely a different version of the same denialism: for them, the problems of Britain are the result of robotic-process University-focused education, workers with an obstructive attitude pricing themselves out of the market, crypto-communist wreckers in the trades union movement, too much welfare spending, too much public sector wastage, and a general sufficiency rather than can-do attitude among the Sir Humphreys.

Or put another way, the Right doesn’t care a fig about the socio-investment consequences of swinging the razor-sharp pendulum in the opposite direction…in the hope that it will never return in an arc to cut them off at the knees.

“Please sir, it wo’nt me sir. It was ‘im sir. Nuffink ter do wiv me sir”. This is what Britain suffers from in every stratum, culture group, social class, age band and other demographic differentiator: Mefirst Mefirst Mefirst…but It’s not my fault the money’s run out and the discipline’s gone: it’s all their fault.

How rare it is today to see a sentence with the words ‘all our’ and ‘fault’ in the same line. How rare it is to see an incompetent resign. When’s the last time you heard a public apology about anything?

Yet the simple truth remains that, without idiot radical/pc social ideas in the 1970s, Union militancy in the1980s, cuts to educational programmes over the same period, Big Bang in the City, demutualisation of Building Societies, failure to grasp the EU nettle, braindead Blairite target setting in the Naughties and now Camerlot’s austerity nonsense in the new century’s teenage years, Britain would be in far better shape.

The unwillingness of two bankers I met last year to accept there was anything wrong with UK investment banking’s model is neither more nor less mind-boggling than three months spent this year with British workers who see overcharging, absenteeism, irresponsibility and shoddy workmanship as par for the course – and thus no cause for shame. They do say it is a bad workman who blames his tools. But they also say it’s a plumber who blames his workmates.

You see, whether the example be macro or micro, for too many Britons today, it’s not my fault or our fault, it’s his fault and their fault. For a sizeable minority beyond that, it’s nobody’s fault. And for a tiny minority of us who’ve seen every profession and trade turn bad, it’s everyone’s fault.

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