I have to admit to being amused this morning that the FT has been daft enough to run a story that begins:
Labour is in danger of looking anti-business in the run-up to the 2015 general election, the former head of the Institute of Directors has warned.
Well fancy that, I thought. Whoever would have believed it? What next?
I know there's slightly more to the story than the headline suggests, but let's be candid; if Labour was as pro-business as the IoD would want it would very definitely not be doing its job properly.
Shall we move on to some real issues? Where shall we start? Corporate tax abuse? In whose interests business is run? Pay differentials? The failure to invest? Banking failure? A lack of accountability? Big business use of tax havens? I could go on, and on, and on......
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🙂 Seems to me that a question is “who’s business”, well before Labour runs in to prioritising individuals over businesses. Fair to say the IoD means “big business” when it says “business”?
I think your assumption is right
What a nonsense article! The usual myths about driving investment away-the banks have been doing that for 35 years! As for the energy cartel we need transparency about price fixing and getting a ‘real market’ in operation.
As for ‘hugging a banker’ see Soros: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/10684896/George-Soros-blasts-parasite-banks.html
No doubt the Tories will offer us a crescendo of the usual ‘spending =debt’ and ‘anti business myths’ which will dumb-down the debate in the usual infantile manner up to the election.
I am not sure there can ever be a ‘real market’ for energy, there are too few players in both the generation side and the retail side. Combine that with the fact they all have to buy their fuel from the same sources (pretty much), so the costs of production are pretty much the same and you have extremely limited scope for price differentials from one provider to another.
What you need is strong regulators and more transparent accounting – especially to ensure that costs in the multinationals are fairly apportioned to the UK side of their businesses.
Well I suppose you could think about re-nationalising but I think that’s probably anti EU reg’s.
Many of us have yet to see any evidence that BluLabour actually are against Big Business. As discussed in a previous blog, there are no signs that Labour will reverse the ConDem reductions in corporation tax, or that they’ll use any extra tax revenue from anti-tax avoidance legislation to do anything other than boost private sector contracts and profits for public service delivery. As ‘Sol Picciotto’ pointed out Labour’s commitments on tax avoidance are very carefully worded, to avoid scaring either wealthy people or multinationals to the extent of being feeble and useless. We can see an example of this in today’s BluLabour announcements on tapping pension tax relief and taxing bankers’ bonuses to fund youth ’employment’ schemes; it would seem to me that Labour’s approach is yes, the wealthiest individuals could pay more tax; but that tax will be used to subsidise workfare ‘light’, giving young people no choice but to work in low paid and non-paid work that benefits the profits of big business hugely, allowing them to keep more of their profits to offset any rise in corporation tax, which in turn boosts the pension funds of wealthy individuals that are invested in those companies, more than off-setting any loss of pension tax relief. As we know, the market always finds a way around itself: BluLabour seem to be saying that in return for ‘higher’ taxes, the wealthiest will actually get even MORE say over the economy and society. I suppose that’s what Miliband means by giving more back to those who ‘contribute’ most.