For all their talk of innovation, the Lib-Cons are more concerned with pinching pennies than investing.
The UK government’s 131-page The Plan for Growth, published with Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget speech last week, speaks of innovation no fewer than 86 times. Clearly the Coalition has become more exercised about innovation than New Labour ever was:
Yet for all the rhetoric about innovation in the Budget, both the official concept of it and the sums of money made available for it are very modest. Accountants wrote more of the Plan than did innovators: everywhere one can detect the dead hand of penny-pinchers in the Treasury. The narrative on innovation as it currently exists is a low-carbon one (58 mentions), drawn up by Vince Cable’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Theirs is a low-investment narrative, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that, in the 2000s, UK business investment as a share of GDP was one of the lowest in advanced economies.