Wyn Grant on the short-termism endemic in British industrial policy:
"(There is) a profound uncertainty, which has never been resolved, about what Government’s relationship to industry should be (which is compounded by) the separation of industrial and bureaucratic careers, and by the character of a civil service in which stability, smoothness of operation and avoiding embarrassment for ministers often seems to be the first priority of government."
Nothing much seems to have changed there!
REFERENCE - W. Grant, ‘Government and manufacturing industry since 1900’ in G. Jones and M. W. Kirby (eds.), Competitiveness and the State: Government and business in twentieth-century Britain (Manchester, 1991), 116.
