Given the popularity of the phrase “joined up thinking”, I was thinking that from this government even some thinking would be nice.
Take the new tax on immigrants for using the NHS, increased to pay for nurses’ pay, because the government seems to have run out of money for annual pay rises. Strange because they come round every year, you would hope someone is thinking about next years pay rises and where the money is going to come from. But I doubt it.
Now business is pointing out that giving it the government’s gracious permission to actually hire some desperately needed foreign workers is nice but then ramping up the cost is counter productive. My dog could have seen that one coming.
Then the plan to turn Cambridge into the science capital of Europe. Being in Horizon would help that a lot, so the ambition is already hobbled by the lack of joined up thinking and then, of course, you have the small problem that Cambridge has neither the transport infrastructure, nor the water for a massive expansion of industry and housing. Nor do its local politicians including my old co-worker Anthony Browne, want any such thing in their back yard.
So where is the joined up thinking, or for that matter any thinking at all?
This is government of impossible or impractical schemes, pushed out by cynics to gain one day’s headlines, with no real expectation that they will ever happen or if they do how they could possibly work.
A government that has run out of ideas is one thing, but one that cannot even think is quite another.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
“A Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy” (Benjamin Disraeli) - this bunch isn’t even organised (credit: John Naughton)