Fiscally Fickle
With regards to McDonnell’s 5 year plan for fiscal responsibility is hilarious – 11th March 2016 and speech on fiscal responsibility: I note that they will not borrow for day to day expenditure but only for “investment” – given that “investment” without any qualification can mean anything they want it to the whole pledge is an absolute farce.
Susan Sharkey, London, UK | @susiesharkles
Interesting to see the right wing financial position vacated by Osborne as he shifts left occupied by McDonnell.
Who’d have believed it? Next McDonnell will start talking about removing red tape, enabling small businesses, tax reform & deregulation.
Paul Ingram, Pulborough, UK
Big Brexit Business
Daniel Hannan’s piece on the bizarre sacking of the BCC head was interesting.
The sacking of Mr Longworth was bizarre in about three different dimensions. One is that many small companies are more ambivalent about the benefits of the EU, for many they are illusory, or even negative.
The tendering processes for public sector organisations and large projects have become an absolute nightmare for many not-so small companies, with more and more legislation embedded and constantly updated legislation. So that despite the ostensible readiness of organisations to help small business, the process of passing through the hoops usually ends up meaning that only the very large, with very nicely presented teams of people presenting their very nicely presented tender pitches tend to end up winning.
Of course then what they do very often is hire in the local small companies, on very onerous T&Cs ensuring the work is done is done way under budget allowing very generous self awarded profit margins. Had the organisations taken on the small firms themselves the cost of their projects would be far lower.
Much is made of consortia of small firms banding together to gain the mass to ensure the tendering organisation gets confidence that they are able to deliver on any promises.
The legislation ensures that all such consortia are then only as good as their weakest link , or the smallest and busiest of the group with less time to spend ticking the boxes and updating the various policies and risk assessment forms.
All of the problems of trying to get directly contracted work are shared by almost every small company, and these make up the bulk of Chamber membership, which makes the treatment of Mr Longworth odd from that point of view.
Not as odd as any organisation in a liberal western democracy sacking anyone for their genuinely held views where those views are not against the Law. A robust organisation should be able to encompass a variety of different individual views if not embrace then corporately.
Are they proposing to start sacking the paying members who may speak up for leave?
The totem of corporate unanimity should have been toppled and then chopped up for firewood by the events in the financial world in 2007-08…. The actions of the BCC are very very analogue for people professing to want to live in the Digital age.
Ted Ditchburn, North East England, UK
It’s not 36 companies, it’s not 35 companies, it’s now reduced to 34 out of the original 100 who were asked to sign up. Mark Bolan, the Dutch head of M&S, was reduced to an individual not a company when the firm refused to risk their name and reputation by allowing him to sign on their behalf. Furthermore, Mr Ivorian Tidjane Thiam of Credit Suisse is now telling us that an imminent recession will collapse the Eurozone. How very off message is that.
Now we learn that a special aide to David Cameron put pressure on the British Chamber of Commerce to sack its head, Mr David Longworth, even before he had made his personal opinion known about supporting a Brexit.
This is the biggest decision British voters will ever have to make over our countries future. In order to do so properly we need to hear the unvarnished truth about the consequences in order to help us make that kind of momentous decision. There is very little time left between now and June and constant concealment of the truth from us by Downing Street simply fuels suspicion that this deal has so much to hide. We had Sir Jeremy Haywood creating the ridiculous scenario that the only way pro-Brexit ministers could find out what was happening in their own government departments was by submitting freedom of information requests!
With the heavy handed way the government is handling its campaign to remain you begin to wonder are we living in North Korea or a liberal democracy!
Bill Power, Newry, UK
I think I am less surprised than Daniel Hannan was by the way in which big business found Brussels accommodating. For one thing, that was one of the ways in which the Common Market was advertised to us before accession and sold to us during the 1975 referendum. There was a lot of talk about how, for instance, membership of the Common Market would enable Britain to sell more Rovers abroad, to compete with Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The reality was that the Germans were already setting the benchmark for cars.
It’s hard to believe now, but British Leyland (incorporating Rover) was considered a major industrial presence in the 1970s and it was state-run, very badly. That was the kind of business that Prime Minister Edward Heath and Geoffrey Rippon expected to benefit from Common Market membership. Heath never concerned himself for a single moment with the plight of the small entrepeneur. For him, it wasn’t mere ideology, but a pathology. The PM who couldn’t bring himself to speak to women was incapable of taking into consideration the views of the little people. Remember that we entered the EEC after no more than a vote in Parliament. The 1975 referendum merely rubber-stamped a fait accompli.
Christopher Booker detailed, many years ago, how eager, or at least ready, big firms were to absorb ostensibly debilitating costs, in the knowledge that the same costs would be lethal to smaller competitors. When vendors of seafood were pounded with new regulations concerning food preparation, the likes of Asbury could smile and continue, while small enterprises went to the wall.
I worked for a well-known multi-national, for many years. Only about a quarter way through my time at this company, I read an article by Theodore Dalrymple, in the Daily Telegraph, in which the author decried the disastrous levels of bureaucracy in the NHS. He listed a series of items on which then NHS management was fixated. My jaw dropped ever closer to the floor, because the unfulfillable, ideological targets of the NHS were identical to the ones we had, complete with idiotic “mission statements”, which occupied much time, but provided absolutely no benefit to anyone.
I grasped at that point that that particular multi-national’s “human resources” department would be the last bit of the corporation standing. That corporation is still going, but a new arrival from Mars would struggle to understand what it actually does today.
Owen Morgan , England, UK
SNiPers
After reading, Blood and soil Nationalists are an embarrassment to Scotland – 12th March 2016, the reaction from SNP supporters comes as no surprise at all, they don’t take kindly to anything but praise.
The SNP MSPs are people who should know better than to actually block you from their pages if you have the audacity to ask a question they have no answer for! At the same time, they will retweet the most disgusting tweets from their less intelligent admirers. Let’s face it they are the most embarrassing political party ever and are quickly bringing Scotland to its knees!
Josephine MacDonald , Irvine, Ayrshire
I have been dealing with a conversation today where someone claims to have researched the debate over independence thoroughly, and stated “the case for independence was solid (and common sense).” Just what can you do with that sort of mind set? As the New York mayor once said to someone, “I can explain something to you, but I can’t comprehend it for you!” Frankly I despair at the level of understanding of economics of SNP supporters. A number clearly couldn’t care less if they were reduced to eating out of dustbins so long as the hated Westminster wasn’t continuing to humiliate them by shovelling loads of dosh up to Holyrood to pay for everything Scotland’s revenue stream can’t cover.
James McNie , Rafford, Moray, Scotland, UK | @coldwaterjohn
Bubbly monks
Dom Pérignon meant a lot to Champagne but it wasn’t his guidance that created the secondary fermentation in the bottle. Dom Pérignon was only frustrated by the “impurities” of the bubble that came in his wine. It’s only after a visit to the monks in Limoux that he learned that bubbles in a wine are not bad. Even that was one fermentation, second fermentation came only later.
Tom Colman , Flanders, Belgium
Coming up Trump
I support Trump meantime only in so far as he is the anti-candidate.
I would not be surprised to find him turn into a butterfly when he gets to the Republican convention with the votes sewn up. When he needs to be a statesman in the main election against whoever they put up when Hillary is forced to drop out, or heaven forefend, she gets to stay in the race, she will be running against a different Trump.
Trump has big gains he has to make in both the over-50’s and the Black voters, he will change the type of statements he makes to be less right-wing.
Colin Mackenzie, Glasgow, Scotland
