Non-Isolational Identification, Cavity-Oriented Satiation

Since a change of policy is out of the question, the Government has decided on another significant change in "political strategy"; in Oldspeak, a nice new manicure for the wagging moral finger. The business secretary, Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, and the Secretary for Worker Flexibility, John Denham, apparently decided six months ago that it might not be a bad idea for them to work together; half a year later, they have concluded, in Denham's words: "We need to be able to say what sort of country this is going to be." Well, there's a unique selling point if ever there was one. Denham also believes that, as far as the Parliamentary Labour Party is concerned, "the crucial thing is rebuilding confidence and getting some backbone into people again", so that they will stop listening to their constituents and rebelling against the whip.

What else do we need? Well, I'm jolly glad you asked. "We need a much more active and interventionist approach to building up Britain's economic strengths in the future. You cannot just hope it is going to happen", which is what everyone has been doing so far; "you have to align everything government does", by getting the business secretary and the skills secretary to speak to each other now and then, for purely random example; but also "including in the way you invest in research, in skills and the way you invest to build the areas of the economy like low carbon, the digital economy, nuclear power"; or, in Standard English, runways at Heathrow, the database state and radioactive incompetence. Denham noted that "At the moment, someone can produce a projection where we need 30,000 skilled engineers, and it's clear we are going to get 10,000", possibly because of the effectiveness of New Labour's engineer training programmes over the past decade or so; hence "No one necessarily steps forward to say: 'What about the other 20,000?'", which is something that might be considered a not altogether desirable omission under the circumstances. "So we are now saying we are going to have a much more interventionist role to make sure that the gaps are filled, and not just identified." Identifying gaps without filling them would be a bit like just hoping it is going to happen, you see.

Meanwhile the Glorious Successor has shown the merits of the active, interventionist approach by insisting that the banks alone are responsible for the recession; hence the financial rewards which he has been throwing at them while jobs disappear up and down the country. He also said that "banks and financial institutions needed to uphold traditional moral values of hard work and effort, enterprise and honesty", but does not appear to have specified which of our venerable financial institutions originated the said traditions.