Less than a year after he was sacked as David Cameron’s enterprise adviser for claiming that we’d “never had it so good”, Tory peer Lord Young is to return to Downing Street. The Telegraph reports that he will take up his old post later this week and “spearhead a new push to help businesses thrive by ridding them of red tape and stifling health and safety regulations.”
In fairness to Young, he was right to point out that those with tracker mortgages were better off thanks to record low interest rates of 0.5 per cent. It was his reference to the “so-called recession” that was truly absurd. 11 months after his comments, there are 2.57m people unemployed, including 991,000 young people, and economic output is still 4 per cent below its pre-recession peak, suggesting that this will be the slowest recovery since the end of the First World War. Living standards are set to fall by 10 per cent over the next three years. What we are experiencing is not a “so-called recession” but a so-called recovery.
Young has no doubt learned to keep his eccentric views to himself but Cameron’s decision to resurrect such a deluded figure raises more questions over his judgement.
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