Just three little things here

Three little stories that appear in front of us:

Rishi Sunak’s Future Fund scheme mostly backed “zombie businesses”, according to a director who helped to oversee the pandemic venture capital scheme.

The £1.1 billion programme is likely to leave “a significant tail of dormant companies”, with the majority of those backed having a “limited chance of growth to a sufficient scale for success”, according to a non-executive director at the British Business Bank, which runs Covid-19 finance schemes.

To put this as mildly as possible, government appears not to have a great talent for picking winners.

Nicola Sturgeon has been accused of abandoning Scotland’s islanders "on a catastrophic scale" after disruption at a state-owned ferry company led to rationing.

Willie Rennie, the former leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, said confidence in the government had been "shattered" by ferry disruption affecting residents of the Western Isles.

Some shops were forced to ration essential items such as milk and bread over the weekend after a ferry operated by Edinburgh-owned CalMac was taken out of service for a third time in a matter of weeks, The Herald on Sunday reported.

Government appears not to have a grand talent for running things.

Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak should cancel the £1,400 energy price cap increase in October in a new “energy furlough scheme” and government should absorb the £36bn cost of the hike, the leader of the Liberal Democrats has said.

Ed Davey said neither candidate appeared to have any policies that grasped the magnitude of what could happen this autumn. “We are facing a catastrophe this winter, a drop in living standards unlike anything we have seen in my lifetime,” he said.

Government does have that talent for making money printer go brr and thereby devaluing every other piece of it in existence.

Incompetent at selection, incapable at management and harming everyone to pay for it. Perhaps this idea that we need more government intervention in the economy, more planning, isn’t quite - again to put it as mildly as we can - the most sensible of ideas? Despite the fact that it appears to constitute at least 90% of all ideas about politics and governance.

As we might have remarked before the argument against government is simply to look at what governments do.