If you wanted to completely destroy a modern twenty-first century economy there are various places you could start. You could print money to finance unlimited government spending. You could put up tariff barriers on all your main imports. You could even try raising the minimum wage to £30 an hour, while cutting the working week to three days. In truth, however, if you wanted to do some real long-term damage your best bet would probably be this. Nationalise the broadband network. Unfortunately, that is what the Labour party has just proposed.
Labour has made a splash today with a headline grabbing proposal to provide free broadband for everyone by 2030. In effect, BT’s network would be taken into public ownership, and provided to customers for nothing, with the cost paid for by a tax on technology giants such as Google and Amazon. It is a bad idea in so many ways it is hard to keep track of them all.
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