Yesterday's Leicester Mercury front page seemed to chime with a lot of businesses (click on link below); Thousands of well-run small and medium-sized companies across the UK say they have gone to the wall because of lack of help from the Government.
H Beesley's case is fairly unusual because of the allegation that the parts they were exporting to Iran could have helped make nuclear weapons. But the view that the Government doesn't do enough for small and medium-sized firms, voiced throughout the economic downturn, is certainly compounded by this episode.
The point here is that the company is not a victim of the credit crunch, but Government interference, which can at best be described as over-efficient officialdum, and at worst as a complete over-reaction.
Before all this happened, it was a thriving hi-tech company which has supplied parts to the Eurofighter and Royal Navy nuclear submarines and in the past six years had doubled turnover to £5.6m and its workforce to 123.
The company says it was under the impression Government officials were willing to come an arrangement where the £900,000 it owed the HM Revenue & Customs was paid off over a number of years.
However, at a meeting with Business Minister Ian Lucus it was told it was not worth saving because it was "too niche" and its customer base was too small.
And which bank advised the department on whether Beesley should be helped or not? One Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be bailed out with billions of pounds of taxpayers' money.
RBS may not have been accused of helping to make nuclear bombs, but it did contribute to a financial time bomb whose fall-out was deadly.
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