Startupbritain stupidity

The Startupbritain website was unveiled last week - it's a collection of advice and offers for people who want to start their own businesses, and though it's privately backed, it's also heavily supported by the Conservative-led government.

Unfortunately, it got a lot of things wrong. A long and ranty but interesting post at the Postdesk website analyses some of the problems, such as the fact that the £1,500 of deals for each starting business is nothing of the sort - in fact many of the vouchers offered are of little use or are available to anyone anyway.

The Guardian yesterday rounded up criticism from other people, and Creative Review pointed out that one of the design firms the website was enthusastically promoting was actually a race-to-the-bottom US site that doesn't benefit Britain or designers in general. That link has since been removed but the original site is still referenced.

Postdesk also has a follow-up post talking to both an entrepreneur whose involvement in the site isn't as clear as it first appeared, and to one of Startupbritain's founders, Oli Barrett, who enthusiastically defends the site.

And a comment posted on Metafilter indicates how governments (apparently not the British government in this case) can see this sort of thing:

I worked for a government agency tasked with commercializing technology. When I started there was a sector-building approach (provide resources in focused areas such as clean energy, software, etc) but a new CEO came along who made it all about entrepreneurs. Since we were government funded, the "leadership" felt we needed to tell success stories in order to get funding next fiscal. So the bus dev officers (I was one of them) were pressured to somehow take credit for the hard work of startups, in order to say that, thanks to our agency, these startups were successful. Which was a lie. A very hurtful lie, considering the amount of hard work it takes to build a business versus the utter sloth, mixed with rapaciousness of a government agency.