May 13
Under state capitalism, as practised in China, the government owns the major industries but allows them to use the price mechanism and other levers of the free market to compete. What we have in Britain is almost the opposite of that. Businesses are allowed to stay in private hands but with so many instructions, targets and, increasingly, price controls that it could perhaps best be described as a capitalist command economy.
Not since the early 1980s has the government had such a stranglehold over economic life in Britain. It is well known that taxes are at a rec
