|
NEWS November 09 2001
|
||
| Businesses tell Blair, ‘Stop picking on us!’ Undifying scenes this week at the Confederation of British Industry conference as business leaders struggled to find new demands to make on the government. According to CBI chair Digby Jones, Blair’s government is bent on unnecessarily regulating business, pushing burdens onto companies rather than individuals because ‘businesses do not vote’ – not yet, at least, though it doesn’t appear to reduce their power. Jones also called for Chancellor Gordon Brown to draw up an emergency corporate aid plan in case of a recession – he seems to have forgotten that (a) companies are supposed to welcome the cut and thrust of increased competition which fosters the survival of the fittest, and (b) surely a corporate aid plan would be a distortion of the free market, just like the minimum wage Jones and his colleagues resisted so ferociously. The highlight of the conference, however, must be CBI president Sir Iain Vallance’s speech blaming the September 11 terrorist attacks on the global wealth divide. At first glance, it seemed he had had a blinding flash of revelation and was about to renounce the corporate world and start campaigning for economic justice. Unfortunately, he went on to claim that ‘the protests and direct action against Western capitalism, which we have seen develop over a number of years’ had ‘spilled over into terrorist attacks’. Err, no. Vallance did recognise that ‘Western democratic capitalism’, that great oxymoron, has its flaws, but his final message seems top suggest that the problem is simply one of presentation, ‘[Business] has a responsibility to demonstrate the key contribution that its task of wealth creation makes on behalf of society as a whole - including that of the Third World.’ A long way to go here, perhaps. Sources: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1639000/1639044.stm and other BBC coverage of conference. |