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1977……Jubilee Year, the country is bedecked in red white and blue and street parties are planned in cities and towns the length and breadth of Britain. Now, what can we have as a soundtrack for this scene? For me it has to be the Sex Pistols with 'Anarchy in the UK' but those who were around then may have their own favourites. 

Why is this year significant? Because this was to be the start of my first enterprise.

A friend of a friend had told me how you could get an ice-cream round for the summer from one of the local Italian firms. All you had to do was buy your stock from them, put fuel in the van you hired from them and you were on your way to your first million.

‘It might rain’, ‘the van will break down and your ice cream will melt’, ‘what about the competition’ were amongst the responses from my peers. But the killer blow was a parental one; ‘No, you can’t have £50 to get started’. So that was it, I opted for the ‘safe route’ of selling ice creams under contract at air displays and county shows, working for yourself was not the done thing for a Grammar School lad now at University.

Let’s now dramatically move from Doncaster in 1977 to the Lebanon, where a guy I recently met was starting his own business as an offshoot from his fathers business. And let’s move forward in time to when he was running another business in Africa, and now to the present day when he now lives in Birmingham where he surveys the many obstacles to starting a business again from scratch while I work in the public sector with nice holidays and a good pension.

Was I genetically engineered to work for other people? Or were the surroundings I was brought up in responsible for my never taking the big plunge?

Then there was Thatcher, and home ownership, share ownership and self employment became normal across large swathes of Essex. But was this beginning of ‘enterprise culture’ a way of subjugating the population, stopping them striking, and providing an illusion of wealth and freedom that would make them forever Tory?  

And is there still something a little Un-British about running a business?

I now feel compelled to mention Richard Branson - one of the few home grown entrepreneurial heroes. Will he follow Freddie Laker and his failed Skytrain business into oblivion? The build-em-up, knock-em-down mentality would surely claim its highest profile victim if that happened.

And what about other high profile entrepreneurs? There’s that Russian upstart who owns Chelsea football club. And there’s that nice Indian gentleman who owns the worlds biggest steel company, and I almost forgot Mohammed Al-Fayed who despite being the perfect Englishman and owner of Harrods displays distinct Egyptian tendencies.

So am I now saying that we are the new America, where people arrive with or without money and then go on to make a damn sight more?

If so, then the commercial environment is proven conducive.

So have many of us been scared off enterprise by our educational system? Do we stick with the safe, known and expected, and do we have our innate enterprising thoughts driven out of us by a packed national curriculum and lack of exposure to role models?

Or is this a further legacy of the industrial revolution which means that many of us can point to several generations working at the same factory, mine, railway or branch of public service? 

So how do we go about creating the kind of environment where enterprises can start, survive and thrive?

The Belgians have an answer. For starters you need a qualification, a kind of licence to run a business. This alone prevents ill fated start ups, and the educational involvement doesn’t stop there.

Syntra West, who are based in Bruges, are the nearest thing we have to an FE college but they have few staff to teach the new enterprises. Instead they pull in expertise from successful businesses and have 2,500 individuals on their books who can teach, coach and mentor. [And this being Belgium, employment is also provided for hordes of public sector workers to monitor, administer and produce reports on enterprise.]       

And now over here, enterprise is becoming a growth industry for education. We have enterprise collegiates and all manner of groupings all hammering home the enterprise mantra. Kids run their own practice businesses, universities have enterprise units and there’s all manner of support packages.

One small snag though. Money!!

You need it to start a business, and can often only get it from running a business, so maybe the sons and daughters of today’s business people will be the ones making the running in twenty years time. And my descendants are doomed to lifetimes of servitude for multinationals until their 75^th birthdays?

For most of us the value of houses, or rather the size of the typical mortgage is more likely to keep us on the employed straight and narrow rather than venture into the risky world of running a business.[ This does though give hope to the fifty-something’s who are approaching the end of their mortgages and currently dabbling in e-bay!!!  ]   

But what about our bright youngsters? They face a double whammy.  Being laden with debt and barely able to buy a starter flat is not conducive to taking a gamble with that great business idea. So ironically, our increased wealth as a nation and the spread of higher education [both at considerable cost] may have the effect of further stifling ideas of self employment.

The test for me will be in a few years time. When my children are have been through all their young enterprise initiatives and are at University, will they ask me for £200 to start an ice cream round and what should my answer be?