The royal family has been accused of a great number of things, from extravagance to vulgarity. But to blame the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for limiting UK economic growth in the second quarter to 0.2 per cent — as the Office of National Statistics did this week — is a bit rich. If an extra day’s holiday for the royal wedding in April closed our offices and factories, it surely boosted the tourist industry and sent bone china manufacturers into overdrive.
George Osborne would be ill-advised to bring up the subject of the royal wedding or any of the other excuses given by the ONS for the sluggishness of the economy: the Japanese tsunami, the warm spring weather and consumers — allegedly — drawing in their horns in order to save money for Olympic tickets. Our national statisticians are behaving like the board of a failing company which will resort to any old excuse to try to justify its bonuses in the face of bad results.
What the ONS has failed to mention in its analysis of economic growth, on the other hand, is the slow progression of the government’s pro-business agenda. How much greater might economic growth have been had Whitehall stuck to last year’s coalition agreement? We were told that it would be possible to set up a business ‘with one click’. The public was to be given a chance to nominate unpopular laws for abolition, and a ‘one in, one out’ rule was to balance any new law with the repeal of an existing law. The reality is a long way short of matching the promise.
Nothing has been done to repeal Labour’s mountain of employment law. Public sector bodies this year will be forced to spend £30 million complying with the duty — enshrined in the new Equality Act — to conduct ‘equality audits’ of their staff.
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