No wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly

With one state-imposed compliance exercise after another getting in the way of business, no wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect this week, has imposed a huge bureaucratic burden on companies and charities — as well as, for those that do it properly, a sacrifice of valuable data — following hard upon the UK government’s demand last month for ‘gender pay gap’ statistics from every entity with more than 250 employees.

On the other hand, what a rare pleasure it has been to delete so many GDPR-driven ‘Click here to stay in touch’ emails from people and organisations I never had any wish to be in touch with in the first place.