Taxpayers lose £400m as result of investment fund set up by Rishi Sunak
Report shows 334 companies backed by Future Fund, set up in May 2020 by then chancellor, have since gone under
And who thinks that any of the other such clever wheezes will do any better?
Shortly after the launch, the BBB’s then chief executive, Keith Morgan, warned ministers that the scheme would mostly attract “second-tier” companies that could not attract investment from elsewhere and that achieving value for money for the taxpayer was “highly uncertain”.
Exactly.
Number 1,327,653 in an infinite series, entitled “They might as well have fucking set fire to it.”
At least that would have kept a few pensioners warm.
My guess is that those companies that received funding fall in to at least one if not both of these categories:
I’d also add “cool stuff that we like” and “companies who are really adept at filling out government forms”.
HS2 is because people want cool railways. They can then put a justification around it, but it’s little boys that grew up with Hornby trainsets or want to have the status of “The Europeans” (even though it’s only actually 4 countries with high speed rail, all of which have very different geography).
And none of the 4 are profitable.
They could hide the losses by keeping the companies forever in 100% government ownership.
Oh, we tried that before, didn’t we.
Venture fund values go down for a few years as bad businesses fail and hopefully rise again when winners take off. So it is too soon to call failure. However I strongly object to the taxpayer funding sex parties that I don’t get invited to.
I call failure. Right now. Although it would have been safe to call failure the moment the initiative was announced, because it is administered by the ever-useless UK public sector.
I reckon investors in a VC fund would be bandying the word failure about if their manager had lost more than one third of the capital deployed after four years.
It’s almost certainly a failure because none of the people involved in it have a stake in it. It’s Milton Friedman’s Four Ways of Spending Money. Warren Buffett owns about 15% of Berkshire. Fucking up will make him poorer. So, he’s going to think hard about not fucking up.
Like no-one running government really cares if HS2 is a total bust. And it is. Because no-one cares much about reducing a journey from 82 to 49 minutes. At 82 minutes, you’ll still go and do a meeting with a client, and at 49 minutes, it’s too long for a commute.
If you gave me a billion quid to invest and it wasn’t my money, and I got no cut of it, I’d pump it into things like satellite internet, which I want to happen. I’m not going to put in the effort to find the best ROI.
The sad thing about Rishi was that he was our least bad PM since John Major got the boot. Which is a cruel commentary on the rest of the clowns and traitors.
He was the most Thatcherite and I think, least bad of the Conservatives (Truss was possibly better but we never got to find out).
Boris was actually bad, but gets away with a lot because he’s a likeable bloke: banned drinking on the tube, pro-Olympics, added HS2, locked down the country. Bit of a fascist really.
Also, Rishi is very intelligent. I hope he stays in Parliament.
After hearing Truss on one of the Cato podcasts in about 2014 talking about Brexit I followed her on social media for maybe a year. In the end I stopped after concluding she didn’t have the intellectual heft to be a serious leader. If she’d had the intelligence and political nous to be PM she’d have prepared for what was needed and would have spent more time preparing Parliament and the public for her budget.
‘Failure’ is judged by how much money Friends of Rishi got. I imagine Sunak thinks it is working quite well. Remember, burglars don’t care how much damage they do; it’s not their problem.