Friday 14 February 2003

Pull the other one

So Gordon Brown is to produce a budget for business:
He will say: "The next stage of our programme, one of the themes of the budget, is to work with business, to strengthen competition, enterprise, investment and markets in our economy. To cut the cost of starting investing, hiring and training, to encourage entrepreneurship, to work to improve our work permit system, and continue our reforms of the business tax regime for entrepreneurs, to open up whole sectors of the economy so that more jobs and lower prices can result."
Brown remains an unreconstructed leftist who has piled regulation after regulation on business, especially on the small company sector that is the main hope for new job creation. Is he really going to withdraw all of the red tape introduced by his government? Nobody should fall for his spin.