Governments of all types can usually count on stooges who
will applaud their policies – whether those policies are good or bad.
Some of those stooges are called “representatives of the business
community”.
What? Do we have representatives? Does anyone recall voting
for them?
Few would vote for the “representatives of the business
community” who gave such a warm welcome to the latest of many cosmetic British
government initiatives on training.
Who are these people?
The lack of trained staff is indeed a perennial problem –
but not exactly top of an entrepreneur’s list of priorities when the world
economy seems to be vaporising.
Training is an obsession of bureaucrats and politicians, not
entrepreneurs. Real representatives would be telling governments things they do not want to hear –
“if you want jobs, cut red tape, you idiots” – not wittering on about training.
To be fair, even if governments were prepared to listen to
them, it is very difficult to find genuine representatives of small business. For
a start, we are all militant individualists and the very idea of us having official
representatives is something of an oxymoron.
More to the point, those who genuinely represent the views
of small business are too busy – actually running small businesses – to find
the time for committee work.
So the committees tend to be staffed by the under-employed
and the semi-retired, who are out of touch with the daily realities, and who
are more interested in what they fondly imagine is social status.
They know they will not get their “K” or an OBE – a
knighthood, or appointment as Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the
British Empire – by criticising policies of the government which hands them
out.
As Napoleon pointed out, by such baubles are men led.