Making the UK more competitive
"how to make the UK more competitive, perhaps start by getting rid of the many layers of red tape and regulations"
I think you'd find in many UK companies that it's not the regulations that are the issue, it's the many layers of non-value-added (and indeed often value-obstructing) management. Dilbert's not meant to be a training course for them, but...
Some readers, especially those in corporate software environments, may have heard of CMMI.
A few readers may have heard of Finkelstein's Immaturity paper. Finkelstein seems entirely appropriate for some places I know (obviously not my current employers, just to be clear):
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Finkelstein/papers/immaturity.pdf
"Level 0 organisations perceive their primary technical problem to be software development environments and repositories. With a suitable environment they can, they believe, enforce their policies and processes consistently. They can prescribe standards for and control all documentation. In such an environment they will be able to be able to plug in tools which conform to a complex public tool interface or better still develop their own.
Level -1 organisations while acting in such a way as to prevent software being developed sincerely believe that they are assisting. Level -2 lunatic organisations are contemptuous of advances in software development. They do not care if they produce poor software as they will probably make more money maintaining systems than developing them in the first place. Level -2 organisations have no individuals who know or understand anything about the software development process having dismissed them or promoted them to administrative positions away from software development. Level -2 organisations have a manual describing their software process written many years ago by a software engineer who has long since left the firm." (etc)