Good news from Cumbria

When one read things like this, it's very tempting to despair of our economic future:

THE number of staff employed by the public sector in Scotland has increased by 7,000 in the last year and now stands at 487,000.

I'm sure that it's much the same down south.

Then I saw this heartening story in today's FT. Read the whole thing to see how an entrepreneur kept fighting even when faced with seemingly overwhelming odds:

It is a year since record flooding submerged the Cumbrian city of Carlisle, but the memory is still fresh for Paul Ashley, whose industrial door manufacturing business, Clark Door, was sunk under seven feet of polluted water.

Would that ever growing army of public sector "workers" have coped? Mr Ashley did:

However, through a mixture of good local contacts, teamwork, business support and sheer determination, the company was able to get back to 80 per cent of its production capacity within six weeks without losing a single customer.

And for anyone who is thinking along the lines of "exploiting" capitalist, consider this:

Clark Door employs 80 people, many of whom suffered personally with damage to their homes. But the swift action to rebuild the site meant that no one lost their jobs.

"I told those whose homes were flooded to sort that out first. If they had got their mind somewhere else, they were no use to me."

Perhaps I'm too much of a pessimist. When people like Mr Ashley finally shrug, all of those public sector workers won't know what's hit them.

(Incidentally, if Scotland ever does become independent one must hope that Cumbria will choose to rejoin the Kingdom of Strathclyde.)