Motorways are going nowhere

AS the days of wine and roses (and surpluses) draw to a close, we still see fit to pour money into that rather vague notion of infrastructure. This, it appears, is our master plan for hanging on to our economic good times.

For ‘infrastructure’ we can read motorways. There is no coherent plan for public transport, or public anything, for that matter. But despite reports that a knowledge-based economy is the way forward, the Government has a motorway-building agenda and it wants to borrow money to push it through.

No amount of blather about critical infrastructure from various departments, or hand-wringing from ISME, the small business lobby, is going to make any difference to a manufacturing company’s decision to locate here. It is wages, plain and simple, and on that score we cannot compete with low-cost economies such as those in Asia, even if we pave our streets with gold.