Will Wallace and Gromit join Britain’s growing list of emigres?

Miles Bullough, Head of TV for the Bristol-based animation company Aardman, who make Wallace and Gromit, has said that the company is thinking of heading off-shore due to rising costs. According to a BBC report, “The main problem, he said, was that while films made in the UK can receive government help in the shape of a 15-20% tax credit, UK TV animation receives nothing.” Funny, I thought the main problem was rising costs. After all, if the costs weren’t rising, funding wouldn’t be so much of an issue.

According to the article, “Companies in Canada, Ireland and France also receive government support for producing TV animation at home and in some countries there is protection against imported products. If the situation was the same in the UK it would be “a tremendous boost to our industry”, said Mr Bullough.”

With growth flatlining and our national debt rising, it certainly is a problem that companies are being forced to move out of the UK. The article doesn’t mention which of the business’s costs are rising, but rising costs are indeed a worry. Particularly as, if they’re down to the poor economy and rising inflation, or regulation and high taxes it’s likely that this pattern is being repeated across industries.

But the government funding that Mr Bullough asks for is not likely to fix the problem. In fact, if the protesters down at the OccupyLSX (surely a misnomer as they’re not actually occupying the Stock Exchange, incidentally?) are protesting against anything, surely the corporatism that this request represents is it? Obviously it’s unlikely that they’d see it that way as ‘The Arts’ are considered worthy and moral in a way that ‘Banking’ is not, even though both (when not involved in corporatism) contribute to the economy.

Anyway, if we want to keep Wallace and Gromit in the UK and buying British cheeses, the solution is not to ask for tax credits for selected industries, which do nothing but skew the market, but to lower taxes across the board to make industry more competitive by lowering their costs. Enough special pleading for this area or that industry – time to make the whole of Britain’s economy more competitive so that growth can, at last, start to take off and this debt can finally start to be paid off.