Next year, the British government will be crushed in an electoral landslide of epic proportions, partly because it absolutely does not understand how entrepreneurs think or what they do. The left has always viewed entrepreneurs with suspicion, to be tolerated at best, while too many civil servants see them as donkeys and semi-house-trained. But when the job creators buckle, the whole edifice crumbles, and so much that we take for granted disappears.

Yet when the policymakers do try to support business, it is mostly at the behest of noisy union bosses. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs tend not to be well organised in lobbying terms; by their nature they are individualists, and not political or corporate types. And they carry few votes.

Lip-service is paid to their economic contribution, but legislation almost invariably makes their task harder. In truth, the public sector regards private enterprise as “another country – they do things differently there”.

Currently, fear is in the ascendant, which is why investors have turned to relics such as gold to preserve their wealth. I find such trends hugely demoralising. Buying lumps of metal will not boost economic activity or improve our standard of living. Yet investment demand for gold rose by 64 per cent last year and its price hit an all-time high recently. Such diversion of capital from productive uses, such as backing industry, will damage all our prospects in the long run.

Sadly, asset classes such as venture capital are much out of favour, in spite of their hugely beneficial side-effects – jobs, new technology and so forth. We have to fix this shortage of credit if we are to innovate our way out of problems.

Of course, investors must be free to deploy their cash wherever they choose. And, given the performance of equities in the past 18 months, it is not totally surprising that people are seeking havens such as gold and gilts.

But I hope this is a short-term shift. Ultimately, intelligent societies should direct their savings towards things that can grow and transform lives – in other words, private sector companies. Gold is a passive element that offers no income, while governments can generate income only by forced extraction from citizens.

I firmly hope that government borrowing will not crowd out the needs of the private sector in the coming years. The future belongs to those nations that support free market enterprises – those enterprises that can in turn deliver new products and services the world wants to buy. The alternative is miserable decline.