Economical with the inward investment

Alan Cairns had a right old tantrum on air this morning over the ‘outed’ inward investment body, International Business Wales. Whatever contrived outrage the AM for south Wales west and tory spokesman had summoned up for the interview was soon overtaken by irritation at getting dissed & dismissed when he attempted to assign all the IBW's ills to Rhodri Morgan and Ieuan Wyn Jones viz. for scrapping the WDA in the first place.

It was probably just bad luck that he managed to encounter an amazingly well briefed Beeb presenter who pointed out that: (1) the announcement to incorporate the agency pre-dated the One Wales Government and (2) tory economic heavyweight Ken Clarke has been proposing a similar fate for English development agencies for some time. But for all the shouting over each other, Cairns managed to making a good point rather badly on the fitness for purpose of inward investment practices in recessionary Wales.

Whilst most businesses claim to mourn the loss of the WDA, the truth is that they miss the handout culture the agency engendered and which had given Wales an effective but under-the-counter competitive edge within the UK for over a decade. All that pretty much stopped as a result of anschluss and the IBW is now little more than an expensive hangover from the days of golden goose chases that saw high-flyers attempting to entice US corporations to set-up shop in the valleys.

That particular story stops at Chapter Eleven nowadays and indigenous growth within the knowledge economy is the new catchy but otherwise meaningless political mantra. You do not have to be an economist to know that investment in these trying times means public investment, in all its various manifestations,and that Wales cannot even afford to build new M4 link road yet alone deliver a step-change in economic strategy. The reality is that things will need to first get better in Tokyo before they get better in Treorchy.

As regards all the recent aggro, the general view is that matters would have merited no more than a few headlines if Rodders could have resisted a knee-jerk compulsion to side with his former profession. As one of the First Minister's colleagues privately observed, the old Rhodri would have made an glib comparison with the troubled European outfit once run by former Lib Dem leader Mike German and moved on. Calling Kirsty Williams a liar for fingering a bunch of self-indulgent civil servants was a mistake. Taking the word of those officials at face value was an even bigger one.

Oddly enough, whether IBW is an embarrassment for IWJ is a subject that seems to have been avoided entirely by the usual suspects within the Plaid Blogroll to the extent that they are not even taking shots at the messenger. You have to wonder how long that can last.