Inward Investment

: What matters much more is that Mr Osborne seems to be using the visit to set out – though without quite admitting it – the essential economic statecraft strategy of the current Conservative government, according to The Guardian. That strategy, given added immediacy by the higher-than-expected borrowing figures announced today, is to make Britain increasingly dependent upon inward investment by rich, often authoritarian, nations in order to help finance UK economic growth while maintaining a low-tax regime at home. But what is principally significant is not the sight of a chancellor of the exchequer auditioning for the post of prime minister, interesting though that is. There are broad echoes of the Gordon Brown era in this. His stealthy strategy was to give the UK financial sector its head in return for taxation which he would direct into extra spending on the NHS, the working poor and the elderly. Mr Brown had to face the conundrum of how to supply the Scandinavian levels of public spending the public would like to see while maintaining the American levels of taxation that the public appears willing to pay. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.