I have been an entrepreneur. I am quite proud of the fact. I will certainly never deny it. I enjoyed the experience. I even think I was quite good at it. But I would never claim entrepreneurs built Britain.
Liam Byrne MP does in his new book:
There are three problems, at least, with this book.
First, it makes an unjustified claim on who built Britain.
Second, it ignores the contributions of those with at least equal if not greater claim to have done so (workers, social reformers, those who raised families against all the odds, teachers, medics and those who had the idea of delivering public sanitation and local energy and politcians, amongst so many others).
Third, his list includes not a single women.
One to miss. And a sad reflection on the state of his thinking, I am afraid. If one wanted evidence that the cowardly politician is still alive and well at Westminster this looks to be all that is required.
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Looking at the cover of the book, “buccaneers” are mentioned in the blurb; the definition of these, here: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/buccaneer?s=t includes mention of pirates and raiders. If you correlate this with “The Many Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic” by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, you’ll find that the pirate ships were democracies and that their captains were elected by their crews.
Although I’m judging the book by its cover, I find the reference to these entrepreneurs as pirates as considerably exaggerated with regard to their democratic credentials, but probably highly accurate with regard to the content of their actual economic activity. But I suspect that I wasn’t supposed to see the contradiction, or realise that perhaps Mr Hunt knows somewhat less than he imagines.
It is surprising how much is owed to the Corps of the Royal Engineers and their equivalents in the Royal Naval Shipyards.
Not mentioned by Liam Byrne, I note
And here’s the mottly crew of tax haven based entrepreneurs who want to carve up the UK’s Land Registry for a hefty profit.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/all-bidders-for-the-land-registry-have-links-to-tax-havens-q9vfqw029
Add your voice to prevent this sale by emailing your local MP via 38 Degrees:
https://speakout.38degrees.org.uk/campaigns/947?
I have taken part in another lobby via the Open Government Network of which I a member
But fully endorse the 38 Degrees approach
Another good reason to keep the Land Registry in public hands, it means we can know which properties are owned by offshore companies. Not surprising it is offshore companies bidding to buy it and keep this data out of sight.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/26/revealed-9-rise-in-london-properties-owned-by-offshore-firms
Unhistorical tosh. Doesn’t even mention Wimpey.
Or even Wimpy!
Could there be a pair of Labour MP’s such as Byrne and Tristram Huntmore representative of the failure of the Left? Byrne, I suppose, is still waiting for the fall of Corbyn for his ‘resurrection.’
Byrne’s book would chime in well with the views of Rubashka in you recent blog.
I had the priviledge to work with the people that “built Britain” – they were, for example, the linesmen and cable layers who built the rural power network after WW2 – without which farmers would not now have low cost and reasonably reliable electricity. Oh & I nearly forgot – the engineers that designed the networks and………the government and the tax payers that funded the construction. Society coming together to make life better.
None of this counts these days.
Agreed
My father was one of those people
He retired when the power industry was privatised: the whole ethos of his work had gone
I well remember a distinguished visitor at some gathering at Sheffield University referring to the great and the good who had built the university.
A member of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire shouted in a very broad accent:
“Rubbish – it were brickies, plasterers and joiners who built this place”
I started my career in the ’70’s as a Civil SERVANT, and without moving desks (much) finished it as a BUSINESS Manager. Somewhere in the intervening years someone decided ‘public service bad, business good’ and therein lies a tale. Once upon a time dedicating one’s life to public service was seen as wholly laudable…I wonder whether it is now, in an era when even doctors are ‘the enemy within’, and hospitals have ‘exceeded their budgets’ by making more people well, or ‘failed to meet their targets’ by taking longer to treat people because they have inadequate resources.
I also wonder if any entrepreneur faced with more customers would respond to increased demand by investing less. I look forward to Alan Sugar’s contribution.
This view is not restricted Byrne and Hunt, I can tell you, Richard – though it doesn’t surprise me that these two are both pushing this line, no doubt with a view to what they might do after their time as an MP is over. A few years I worked with a couple of colleagues as academic consultants for an OU/BBC series looking at Britain’s infrastructure. It was clear from the outset that the BBC producers’ line was that everything of any significance – canals, railways, housing, right up to contemporary examples, such as Cross Rail, HS1 and the newest terminal at Heathrow, had to be seen as the work of entrepreneurs, even if these men – and in one case a women – were in actual fact highly paid, and it has to be said, very good, senior (project) managers/leaders. When we pointed out that entrepreneurs were responsible for some developments, but were obviously not in many others, and that it conveniently “forgot” all those people who actually design, plan, manage and construct all of these projects, and without whom no amount of entrepreneurial activity would ever come to much, it soon became clear our input was not really “on message”. What was required was that our modern day fascination with celebrity had to be projected forward and backward in time, thus the need present certain people as entrepreneurs – and thus the star quality/celebrity status that nowadays attaches to the term.
Incidentally, having spent the best part of the past four years authoring postgraduate teaching material on technology and innovation management I can safely say that there are several terms where endemic overuse/misuse has led to the complete trashing of the actual meaning and utility of certain words. They are: strategy, innovation and entrepreneur/entrepreneurial.
So true….
I know that I have not read this book but my goodness……………….I cannot believe it. I just do not know what to say.
Well actually I do.
Another attempt by a Labour politician at brown nosing the free marketeers in order to put across a ‘business sympathetic’ stance to earn some form of credibility with the private sector.
It is sad that such politicians feel moved to ‘celebrate’ so called entrepreneurs rather than that of their own party’s history. It shows a lack of faith in what they and their party actually stood for. And what does it say about the new creed of Labour politician? Unprincipled is what I would call them.
It also reminds me to beware of Labour and their tendency to behave like the Democrats in the USA.
Corbyn needs to start building a coalition with the Greens and others if he cannot work with his own party and people like Byrne. He has to make friends outside the party to survive. That would be my advice.
Also in my view this is not the first time Byrne has written a load of crap – the note he left in the Treasury was the first piece of bad writing and got Labour blamed for the 2008 crash ever since. In fact he should have been dismissed and even excommunicated from the Labour Party for that. The fact that he remains part of the Party also shows cowardice in my view.
Is it not frightening to see how misguided a leading light in labour is? How can he get it so wrong?
I am dismayed that following the 2008 crash, which was a clear dictator of the failings of capitalism and the neo liberal model, that no one has come up with an economic vision encompassing the changes so obviously needed.
Labour lost the election because in the end voters did not trust them on matters financial and the economy.
With this in mind if I were involved in the labour hierarchy, I would make it my priority to develop a new economic vision.
Just this week Tony Blair, bless his heart has criticised Mr Corbyn for this lack of economic vision.
It is no use Mr Corbyn saying that if Labour wins in 2020 it will reform capitalism.
We need to be told about these reforms now and if labour themselves do not know what they are they should set up a body to research, refine and hammer out the details of these much needed reforms to neo liberal capitalism and let us know what their ne economic vision is.
They will then have something to offer the voters come 2020 as an alternative to the same old same old failed model of capitalism.
To me this is all too blindingly obvious.
I think Labour is defining the reforms it wants, now
That is why it is doing research, as far as I can see