From his CBI speech yesterday, attended by The Goblin King:
[The Goblin King] was given a rough ride by Martin Broughton, CBI president, who claimed the [fifty per cent] tax rate had been introduced to divert attention from the government's "failure" to control its ballooning budget deficit. The British Airways chairman said the additional tax take was likely to be minimal but its effect would be to send a dispiriting message to wealth creators.
As Mr Brown listened, Mr Broughton challenged the government to review its spending priorities and focus on its core activities to bring down the budget deficit. If business were responsible for the deficit it would reform public sector pensions, tackle the "mismanagement" of services and discontinue non-core activities, he said.
"In the government's position, we would start educating the public to accept that it is not the government's role to address every issue in society," Mr Broughton said. He added: "How many of the 1,000 quangos costing £65bn a year do we really need?"
"The use of heroic growth assumptions, together with a timetable extended to 2018, amounted to a serious failure to address the deficit in a way that gives confidence to buyers of our debt."
OK, Martin Broughton is Chairman of British Airways, who are guilty of plenty of skullduggery themselves, but wouldn't it be nice to hear some plain speaking like this from Camerosborne?
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Martin Broughton rocks!
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9 comments:
I think you mean CamerClakeOsborne.
I will take no lessons from a group of unrepresentative, pocket filling, pension grabbing, self-appointed business leaders. So there.
"How many of the 1,000 quangos costing £65bn a year do we really need?" Answer. None. Next?
Now there's a surprise. The BBC, although mentioning Broughton, headlines and emphasises Gordon's heroic defence of the 50% tax band and ignores Broughton's other criticisms. Further, being the state broadcaster and transmission belt for government propaganda, the last sentence of the BBC report is that "Mr Brown's speech comes after the UK won praise from the IMF for its bold response to the recession". Although the IMF did issue a statement on those lines, it is relatively uncontentious and has more to do with the bank rescue package than Brown's generally crapola economic policies. Even so, I reckon the over-positively spun pro-Brown interpretation has been put on the list of "consensual" truths of which the BBC will not allow further examination.
BTW if you read the two paragraph executive summary to the IMF report, all it says is that the UK response was "bold and wide-ranging" and were successful in "containing the crisis and averting a systemic breakdown". The statement goes on to say that "the financial system is still under stress. Moreover, the ongoing crisis has given rise to very big fiscal deficits and large contingent government liabilities . .". IMHO this is damning by faint praise. Yes the government kept the financial system in being (having been a prime culprit in the events which led to the potential collapse) but there's much further to go.
How many commentators actually read these reports from the IMF and others in a critical way? Obviously BBC financial journalists might read these reports but they put their critical capabilities on hold while waiting for the official line to be laid down from policy central but then I don't expect nuance from that tainted source. Hold on - I might be doing BBC journalists an injustice. They don't wait for policy central to opine. On the contrary, they are recruited on the basis that their mindsets are already in tune with BBC acceptable policy guidelines. Forget about Peston, Flanders etc, when was the last time a BBC correspondent was allowed (or wanted?) access to one of the BBC's major outlets (or minor outlets for that matter) to comment critically on MMGW or the sheer ineffectuality of wind-farming or the farce of the Catlin expedition?
U, the IMF are a load of rubbish as well, so whether they praised Brown or not is irrelevant.
Agreed on the reporting of the speech; the FT were just about the only ones who mentioned the points on Quangos and so on.
MW
I agree with you about the IMF - it's been an institution looking for a role since the collapse of the Bretton Woods arrangements. Unfortunately, despite (maybe because) being chaired by an unreconstructed French socialist) it has the imprimature of disinterested do-goodness rather like the UN and all those fake charities out there. Accordingly, the BBC and (most of) the rest of the MSM regard anything published by the IMF as if it's written on tablets of stone on Mt Sinai.
BTW this time round I'm relatively impressed by the FT which, as I've written before, is known as the "Pink'un" for both the colour of its newsprint and the colour of its politics.
U, I've a simple rule for all these supra-national bodies (IMF, G20, NATO, EU, World Bank etc) and treaties (Kyoto, anti-drugs treaties, whatever) - Their influence is assumed to be malign unless I can be convinced otherwise - best case they are hugely expensive talking shops.
I received a personally signed letter from Broughton recently. I had written to him to offer him proposals to get his clients out of economic trouble.
This was the Systemic Fiscal Reform Group stuff around ceasing of tax on production and maximising collection of obligations from the idle wealthy in the economic rent of land mostly.
In his response he said thanks but no thanks. We are working closely with the government on this one.
The Moron is aprt of the problem.
RS, maybe you mentioned the idea of auctioning off airport landing slots, rather than handing them out for free? I can see why that wouldn't appeal to him :)
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