Wasting Time at the Investment Summit

The Investment Summit is merely a PR stunt. What the UK needs is policies that attract investors.

As the UK economy awaits the ludicrously delayed budget, today sees the government’s international investment summit. Assorted global captains of industry and investors have been invited to London to be wooed by Sir Kier, assisted by the new investment minister, Poppy Gustavson. She’s at a loose end having sold the tech firm she founded to the US for $4 billion and with time on her hands has filled the role that Ben Wegg-Prosser (one time communications director for Tony Blair) turned down.

It's a pointless job but at least she’ll get some Ermine out of it as the 805th member of the House of Lords. It’s pointless as the UK is, according to the IMF, still the fifth largest economy in the world. The titans of industry and investment attending this summit already know that. They employ minions to keep them informed as to what is going on in the major economies, where they are almost guaranteed to have investments, customers and interests. Imagine the briefings they’ve had from those minions in the past 100 days.

“Hey boss, well as we thought, Labour has won the election. Courtesy of the British system they gave a huge majority, so at least there will be some political stability in the UK. The state machine seems to be in charge.”

“Ahem, boss, when I said stability I didn’t include rioting that’s broken out across the UK, mainly about immigration. You’ve got to hand it to the Brits, when they clamp down they clamp down. The new government seems to approve of anti-Israel marches but not ones against immigration.”

“Morning boss, it seems the new government has found out it’s £22 billion worse off that in thought it was. It’s solving that by taking money from pensioners to give to doctors (but not nurses) and train drivers. We’re still trying to figure out the thinking behind that – this new government doesn’t do plain English.”

“Yo boss. Big policy coming out of the UK. They’re going to stop making electricity from oil and gas in four years, even though they get about 50% of their electricity from gas. The UK already has the most expensive electricity in the world and, as we know, this ain’t going to make it cheaper. Oh, and they’re going to build dams all over Scotland, even though the electricity links from north to south in the UK are already at capacity. They’ve set up some firm called Great British Energy to fund it all, but that only has about £8 billion. The guys in engineering say this net zero is going to take at least 100 times that. As you know, the Brits run a deficit of around £120 billion a year, the interest on which is £80 billion and growing.”

“Boss! Sorry to interrupt your weekend, but the British government has just reorganised itself in a mafia-style change of the PMs chief of staff. They’ve replaced a career civil servant who actually ran stuff with a political thug.”

“Great news Boss! You’ve been invited to an Industry Summit in London. You get to hear from the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and some guy called Gareth Southgate, who is the latest Brit Soccer manager not to win the world cup. And get this, there is a dinner in St Pauls Cathedral – that’s right; capitalists sitting down for their revels in the House of God. The way I see it boss is that you’ve gotta go; you won’t learn anything you didn’t already know or meet anyone you couldn’t meet if you wanted to. But you will be getting an early Christmas shopping trip to the UK before order breaks down and the lights go out. Would you like to route through Dublin so you can look in on our headquarters? The savings we’ve made in corporation tax mean we might be wanting to expand there.”

Precisely nothing new will be agreed at the summit, not least because until Rachel Reeves reveals her budget noone can make any sort of calculations on the post tax returns on investment. While Sir Keir might enjoy having some photos taken in his smart suits, photo ops are not economic policy. Sue Gray might have told him that.

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