Digby Jones, Lord Jones of Birmingham, has written a book detailing his views on how to improve Britain. Business reporter Jon Griffin assesses his proposals.

Britain has “lost its bottle” and is in “serious need of fixing,” according to former CBI Director-General Digby Jones.

The former Birmingham lawyer, who became Trade Minister under Gordon Brown’s Government, launches a series of angry broadsides against modern-day Britain in his new book Fixing Britain.

Lord Jones says in the opening chapter: “Our country has declined to such an extent that it is in serious need of fixing, but we do have the framework on which to base our fightback.”

And he warns later in the book: “We are at five to midnight in this country and if we are to fix it we have no more time for focus groups, for listening to endless objections from the “rights” industry.

“A truly cohesive and productive society awaits but political correctness and fear of offending have no place in banishing the Gimme Society.”

Lord Jones says that Britain is lacking in self-belief. “We don’t celebrate what we’re good at. We merely look inward and criticise all the time. The tragedy is that we have ceased to believe in ourselves.

“Despite all our success, this nation is at a crossroads. We’ve come out of a severe recession and with good, firm economic management we will survive it, but the real poverty is one of expectation. The real depression in this country is not economic, it is the decline in talent, sadly something over which the last Government presided.

“The real worry is that the damage to social cohesion, the destruction of the glue of our society, is permanent.”

He blasted governments for “incompetence” and “poverty of straightforward and honest planning.”

“It has been easier for Government to fashion its own layers of bureaucracy, to intervene and appear to be doing something than to take the more difficult route to plain, simple and effective solutions. Much of this is because few of our politicians have had any experience of real life, or a real job.”

He said the root of Britain’s difficulties lay in the “desperate” state of the country’s education system. “Tony Blair promised ‘education, education, education.

“We got a scholastic generation who are not equipped for the world of work.

“Employers complain that, even after A level studies, many school leavers have basic problems with literacy and numeracy and seem to think that the world owes them a living.”

Baron Jones said many politicians had no experience of real life. “When I was a minister, I’d have advisers and they’d be 25 years old.

“Highly intelligent, they worked hard, but they’d never done anything with their lives, never been a teacher, never worked in a hospital, never worked in business, never accepted the responsibility of employing people and had never taken a risk.

“They were marking time until a parliamentary seat became free in whichever party they supported, where they hoped there was a big majority.

“Then the plan was to get adopted and get elected as an MP. Becoming whip-fodder, keeping their noses clean, the prize would be to become a Minister, and they’d have power.

“But they’d never done anything. Governing the country with no experience of life at all.”

Lord Jones lalso aunched a scathing attack on the coalition Government for abolishing regional development agencies, including Advantage West Midlands.

In his new book, he says: “The coalition Government has made a big mistake abolishing the regional development agencies. They were overmanned and inefficient in many areas, and probably superfluous to some parts of the country.

“But making them more efficient and cutting their budgets is the way forward, not forcing their complete abolition.

“Regional development agencies were independent of party politics. No dipping in the pork barrel of local preferment. A stability and consistency brought about by a business chairman or chairwoman and representation from all parts of the community in a region, with economic growth as the priority and not short-term political reward.

“I am all in favour of Government cutting down on waste, but here it has reduced the drive for regional economic development at the precise time when it needs to be increased.”

Lord Jones’ stint as Trade Minister saw him clash head-on with a Government “machine” which demanded “total obedience.”

He said he was shocked by the “herd-like” behaviour of other Parliamentarians in both the Commons and the Lords.

He says of his time as Trade Minister: “What I hadn’t expected was the omnipotent suffocation by process and the obligatory emasculation of original thought and initiative.

“The Governmental machine demanded complete obedience in a way which anyone outside the Westminster bubble wouldn’t have believed, and it distanced the parties and the politicians from the real world and the real voters.

“While I was irritated by the constant need to get permission simply to do my job, I was shocked by the herd-like behaviour of many of my fellow Parliamentarians in both Houses.

“When the Commons Division Bell sounds, I’ve seen MPs rushing out of their offices or meeting rooms, out of bars and restaurants and into the Lobby. Often they don’t know what the vote is specifically about. They would be told how to vote by the Party Whips.

“They hadn’t of course understood one of the prime functions of the House of Commons, which is the debate and argument, and they had voted in complete ignorance of the real issue – and this is democracy?”

Lord Jones recounts how he refused to sign a 60-page document in a ministerial red box during a 20-minute car journey because he hadn’t time to read it.

“In that short journey, from Waterloo to Park Lane, I realised just what the system was about. You were expendable. You were needed to take responsibility, nothing more. I found it one of the most depersonalising things in a job I had ever personally encountered.

“One day the Prime Minister is telling me, as the new Trade Minister, that I’m entrusted to encourage the world to sign up in to Britain, and then some unaccountable official says with equal apparent authority that I’m expected to be a cipher on some forgotten bit of regulation that I’m not even expected to read.”

>Digby Jones: Fixing Britain, published by John Wiley & Sons, RRP £18.99