Martin Broughton rocks!

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?