You can fiddle with statistics to make them say what you want and now the Government has been accused of fiddling business start-up figures.
The Federation of Private Business (FPB) claims the Government has included an increasing number of sole traders in overall figures for business starts, thus distorting the figures. But there is some political point scoring going on here as well.
The FPB pointed to a report by the European School of Management – which was commissioned by shadow chancellor George Osborne – that says small business growth has been in decline over the last five years. That means they’re still growing but more slowly.
But is continuous, high growth really desirable? Grow the population, grow business, grow profits… where is it headed and what will happen when we start to outgrow?
The credit crunch and all the cascading worries now spilling down the economic chain are all due to a lack of confidence, Greg Wood said this morning on Radio 4. Is that it? Confidence? Are our systems really so fragile and why did we make them so?
Anyway, there certainly seem to be fewer technology start-ups ever since the boom of 2000 just before dot.coms and telecoms declined. But, listen carefully, now the technology start-ups that are getting funded are the ones with good technology and this is much better use of investment money.