First off, they really are. Running around like headless chickens in Whitehall, I mean. I have photographic evidence! Click on this link to the 10 Downing Street website and it shows a headless person running, or at least walking fairly fast, down Whitehall.
At least we now know the person who thought up this proposal. Not that I want to mock the Headless Apparation’s disability, but this is not a conception that can have originated in an actual brain. This one came out of the sacral ganglia in the spinal column, in the manner of the stegosaurus.
PM welcomes scheme to help graduates start businesses.
Entrepreneur First, a new programme to encourage entrepreneurship has been launched today, with recruitment of the first intake due to start this year.Launched on the same day as a series of measures to help enterpreneurs, Entrepreneur First will be a two-year programme, through which graduates with the most promising business ideas will get the opportunity to start their business, with the support of corporate mentoring, business training and networking.
After the two years, participants will have the option to continue building their own business or apply to graduate recruitment schemes in some of the sponsoring companies.
OK. There are worse things to spend government money on. For instance… on second thoughts, I will postpone that rant until I have a spare decade. There are many worse things, but let me count the ways in which this one is misguided.
One, it is only for graduates. Because having uncredentialled people starting their own businesses never works.
Two, it is a two year programme of intensive, expensive help (“corporate mentoring” does not come cheap) to a select few already-privileged individuals – when the length and breadth of Britain the shabby little shops and grotty corrugated-roofed offices on industrial estates that actually provide the jobs are closing. It’s behind a paywall, but today’s Times magazine has an article by Sathnam Sanghera who spent a shift or two working in a corner shop he had passed hundreds of times. The featured quote was “By 8.30am the takings amount to £45, which means the three of us were up at 4am for the sake of making some £9.” Sure, declining sales of newspapers are not the government’s fault – but the hours of official paperwork that shopowners have to do in their so-called spare time is.
Three, that get-out clause after two years. Even I, possessed of the entrepreneurial spirit of a sessile mollusc, can tell that having the option after two years to apply for graduate recruitment in the sponsoring companies is not the spirit that makes a business great. Possibly it is great for the sponsoring companies, though.
I get it. All future entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to submit applications for lots of grants and fill in lots of paperwork in order to apply for advice on how to manipulate all the government schemes on offer to permit people to set up businesses that that will be immediately required to pay up vast sums of money to the state because they are tax avoiders (after all, if you weren’t avoiding tax, you’d be PAYE, wouldn’t you?)..
The best age for setting up one’s own company, IIRC, is one’s late 30s or early 40s.. This is the time with the best mix of personal experience of business and personal energy.
Obviously there are exceptions, and such exceptions (that succeed) do get a lot of good publicity.
On this particular scheme, I suggest following the money: it goes from taxpayers to large successful corporations.
Also follow the motivation. If those companies thought it was a good idea (beyond their existing fast-track/high-flier recruitment programmes), they have more than enough money to do it on their own.
The companies are just taking the taxpayers’ money by flattering the government’s political posture.
Best regards
“OK. There are worse things to spend government money on. For instance… on second thoughts, I will postpone that rant until I have a spare decade.”
Lol!
Hey, this is great! And we could go further. Why don’t we raise the social status and efficiency of self-employment – which of course every government really wishes to Help – by making it a graduate-only career path, with compulsory certification in Best Business Practice before one can legally begin trading?
Soon, UK plc will be invincible!
I love the smell of oligarchy in the morning. On a related topic, as I set off for the station today, I saw the first rat of Spring.
Heh:-/
The corporate parachute is in the true “prizes for all” spirit.
The option to have a go, with the opportunity to get a soft landing and regular income, would result in no shortage of takers….crowding out those with real spirit. It could backfire for the Corporates, of course, with an intake of those not making the normal smooth seque from institutionalised learning to institutionalised earning.
How about a scheme whereby entrepreneurs are able to offset any start-up failures against future income, not just capital losses/gains on a portfolio (which only favours serial investors, not entrepreneurs). So if I risk £100,000 cash in a failed venture (not one that just pays me salaries, natch) I should then be able to offset that loss against future income. Alternatively, to accrue unused personal allowances when not claiming any benefit.
Declaration of Interest: I invested cash and years of relinquished income in a startup.
p.s. Nigel – while I do not disagree with your assertion as to why, late thirties and early forties also coincides with kids and all the risk-averse feelings and pressures they bring about. Also, should things not work out, being in your early/mid forties and trying to re-enter the workforce is no easy task. Trust me.
This is the sort of thing that leads me to have an even more negative view of the future of Britain than I have of the United States.
It is possible that,against all the odds (the billion Dollar Obama warchest – the support of the msm, the domination of schools and universities….) a Republican Congress and President (a real one – not a RINO) will exist in January 2013 – and try and roll back statism, try to save civilzation.
But in Britain?
How can we work for a pro free market, anti interventionist government?
The people will simply say “but the Conservatives are already in power”.
Any “change” will be in the direction of Comrade “Ed” Miliband (and his pals).
In short I fear it is “game over” in this country.