From start-ups to scale-ups (2/2) – signs that Britain is now investing to succeed, not compensating for failure
For years Britain was “working in a paradigm of market failure”: a belief that government should only intervene with public money if there was evidence that a market was failing. This philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism can be traced to the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Unusually, that is the view of a Conservative MP, George Freeman, who chaired the second half of a recent Westminster Business Forum policy conference on scaling up Britain’s start-up businesses. Freeman’s point was that this attitude – long entrenched in Whitehall – was a failure of policymaking rather than adherence to market ideology.
Instead, governments should invest to help markets succeed, he suggested, especially since the British government is one of the world’s biggest technology buyers:
I'm a strong supporter of what the [Labour] government is doing on industrial strategy, and this push to really pull every lever we've got.As Minister [Freeman...
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