Score one for the certainty produced by George Osborne's stubborn faith that he has got it right, and for David Cameron's willingness to abandon promises, some would say principles, to ensure that the coalition government remains in place. This provides the prospect of the policy certainty that is so important to investors.

The second key to sustainable growth is the rule of law. In a sense, this is a subset of the need for certainty, for the rule of law means that an entrepreneur will not wake up one morning, his company taken over by the government, to be followed by his arrest and the sort of trial for which Vladimir Putin's Russia has become notorious. It means, too, that he will not find his intellectual property stolen, copied and peddled at low prices in competition with the products of the inventor; that he will not find some bureaucrat interpreting a vague law in an unforeseeable way.

Britain is not Russia or China. But its bankers do wake up in the morning wondering what they will be allowed to pay their staffs, what capital they will be required to have in the business, just how unpleasant the next ministerial outburst will be, when and where the regulatory axe will fall. Its employers do wake up every morning with a new set of made-in-Brussels rules to live by, gold-plated by an eager domestic bureaucracy that sees an opportunity for meddling, or some home-made restrictions on their right to hire, fire, build and remodel. 

For although Parliament believes — or says it believes — it is supreme, in fact it is increasingly subordinate to Brussels and its anti-growth absurdities, and to a British bureaucracy to which badly or artfully written legislation cedes enormous powers that make a mockery of the idea that Britain is a nation in which the rule of law creates the certainty needed to maximise investment and economic growth. 

And the bureaucracy likes it that way, something of which the Chancellor of the Exchequer seems blissfully unaware. While he claims "Britain is open for business", his officials want to be certain that it is up to them who is allowed through that door. No matter what the law, or the Chancellor, says, they will determine on an ad hoc basis just how animalistic entrepreneurs' spirits will be allowed to become. 

Businessmen, especially those with few resources with which to fight the bureaucracy, adore the rule of law because it provides certainty, the very thing that the bureaucracy fears reduces its ability to make, rather than merely implement policy.