Richie Rich has just come bouncing up to the podium, babbling prettily about Billions of Pounds of Inward Investment into the UK.

Must be the oldest scam in the book.

“Inward Investment” has been around since the dawn of mankind in various guises.

(not sure the “Dawn “ is appropriate for the beginning of one of the worst infections this planet has suffered)

There are three major versions of Inward Investment

• Military
• Commercial
• Politico-cultural.

Military

This is by far the most common and the easiest.

You simply send your army into another country and take whatever you want out of it.

The cost is, of course, the cost of your army in money, resources and human lives. The last is the cheapest and of no significance to you, the ruler.

The return on your investment is whatever you can get, food, gold, slaves, coveted resources and, above all, the servitude of a new population.

Commercial

This is what is being touted at the present.

You put money and resources into buying assets and operations, commercial ventures, in your target country.

The dividend is the profits that you take out of that country. This can be as operating profits, increased value of the acquired assets on final disposal, government grants and advantages during the investment and anything else you can get your hands on.

Put it this way: what idiot is going to “invest” in a country unless there is a healthy profit to be made and returned to your own country?

Finally, there is the possibility of acquiring technical knowledge and expertise that is not already available in your own country. This has frequently been the case for gaining legally what could only otherwise be obtained by industrial espionage.

Unless, one way or another, there is a net outflow from the target country, there is no point in investing in it.

Politico-cultural

This is a more nebulous concept. It is the dissemination of cultural and political influence into the target country so that it becomes more favourably aligned with your own, more accepting of your own methods and mantras.

Both the mechanisms of investment and the dividends are hard to define, but the spread of the influence of the United States on the rest of the world is very evident.

More recently, China has invested in the countries of Africa for exactly this purpose.

In both the Military and the Politico-Cultural versions, the real beneficiary is the ruler, whether as autocrat or ruling clique, of the investing country, often as a sop to their understandable sense of their own inadequacy.

In all versions, there is no sustainable benefit to the target country, unless it is the acquisition of methodologies and expertise that were not otherwise available by its own development. For the United Kingdom, as for many other “developed” countries, this would be an admission of abject failure within their own systems.

Recent examples of Commercial “inward investment” into this country have all resulted in a net outflow of cash, technology and expertise. Specific examples are far too numerous, but I think it would probably be regarded as libel to cite them. I’m sure you can think of more than one example where foreign ownership and investment has not gone well. I believe the foreign participation in the water companies, as noted in the press, has not had a positive outcome. It appears that large sums have been paid out in dividends to foreign interests at the expense of investment in infrastructure.

As far as I can see, stating the only obvious justification for the current much touted round of “inward investment” would cause me a lot of trouble.

So I leave it up to you.