Leader: Growth or bust

David Cameron has said he is determined not to lead a cuts-only coalition. He has spoken about promoting entrepreneurship, rightly hailing small businesses as the engine of Britain’s economic recovery. At the last Tory party conference, he paid homage to ‘the doers and the grafters, the inventors and the entrepreneurs’. He was fully behind these ‘wealth creators’, and no, he said, ‘those aren’t dirty words’. And since then: nothing.

As we digest the news that the British economy shrank during the final three months of 2010, it is worth asking what’s happened to George Osborne’s growth strategy. It seemed not to exist during the general election campaign. In August, the Treasury invited several think-tank leaders to discuss the best way of achieving growth. Some of those in attendance detected a lack of clear thinking, but were prepared to wait for the white paper on the subject promised for the autumn. But it never emerged and a new deadline was set for Budget Day at the end of March.