Do these policies and the accompanying rhetoric matter? Clearly, everyone is affected by them, and tax revenues are used to finance the policy initiatives. Political leaders must achieve results if they are to survive, and increasingly there is the question of what happens if 'the enterprise culture' fails to deliver expected results, as has happened in the case of the EU Lisbon Agenda. Scotland, through the Scottish Enterprise agency, had a long-standing business birth-rate strategy which absorbed considerable investment and expectations, but which ultimately failed to achieve acceptable outcomes and was ended. During the 'enter-prise years' of the Thatcher government in the UK in the 1980s, there was significant encour-agement for unemployed people to become self-employed through the 'enterprise allowance' but, other than temporary reductions in unemployment statistics, little long-term increase in the stock of small businesses (Storey, 1994).