MBK emailed in this from The Times:
The row centres on the sample used by YouGov, which Vote Leave claims was “wholly unrepresentative” of Britain’s 5.2 million companies.
For example, only 20.5 per cent of the respondents had fewer than 50 employees, despite the fact that 99.2 per cent of British businesses employ fewer than 50 people.
Vote Leave also claims that only 22 per cent of the businesses surveyed had a turnover of less than £5 million. The average turnover of private businesses is £673,000.
The CBI is understood to have selected the sample for YouGov from its membership list. In total, 451 of the members selected responded.
All of which seems very likely to me, if you pay attention to these things, you'll find that the larger the corporation, the more pre-EU it is and vice versa. The CBI is the worst of the lot.
Monday, 2 November 2015
"Pro-Europe CBI poll was rigged, claims ‘no’ lobby"
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11 comments:
Also, as far as the pols are concerned, any business employing less than 50 people is too small to be be counted, even as a "small business".
Pretty well EVERY small business I know wants out.
B, indeedy.
L, I wouldn't go that far, but there is a sliding scale of "mostly against" with small businesses and "mostly in favour" if you ask the CEOs of really huge corporations.
Why should anybody take heed of what small business ,or large business, wants? We wouldn't be in the tax credits mess if British business paid an honest day's pay for an honest day's work in the first place or, to put it another way, they supplied in wages sufficient demand to buy all the goods and services the workforce produces.But all British business seems to want to do is cut wages and then watch while the home market is supplied by the efforts of cheap Asiatic labour. On the last Question Time before the election in Leeds Town Hall, one small business representative declared that if he couldn't hire zero hours labour he couldn't stay in business. Rather than shout at him ,the audience nodded in agreement at the sageness of it all ,having mooed at Ed Miliband for daring to disagree with the Tory lie that the Worldwide Crash was caused by Gordon Brown renewing British schools.
Business is totally two faced about Europe. Avon Cosmetics upped sticks from its home town of Northampton years ago and moved the entire operation to Poland because the Poles could be paid a third of British rates.Now Northampton employers are saving on foreign building costs by importing foreign labour back again, not that I blame the workers involved.
It was bad enough when a Labour administration was subsidising British businesses to pay low wages but it has become ridiculous now that a Tory Chancellor (Chancer)is forcing business to pay a living wage by government diktat: commie!
Needless to say successive governments sugar the low pay pill with lashings of house price inflation.
@DBC
Do you run a small business?..... no, I thought not. So don't go second guessing commercial decisions of private businesses.
If the goverment stopped taxing the low paid so much (via the 'not a tax' Ers and Ees NI) and making the transition from unemployment to employment difficult through stupidly high marginal rates then it wouldn't be a problem.
Disclaimer: I run a manufacturing business in a VERY competitive sector and our starting rate (untrained) is WAY above current NMW. Standard rate (fully trained) is higher still and we don't use zero hours contracts.
I don't suppose Northampton has been particularly let down by business but the other big business ,British Timken (admittedly American owned) upped sticks and moved its production to Poland too.Its not that Northampton is a high wage area and it's riddled with working-class Tories who watch other people's job losses with equanimity and send two Tory Mp's to Parliament - from a low wage town.
Guess what they did with Timken's extensive grounds, site of a nationally ranked athletics event? Right: built houses on it.
The Football Club has got itself into trouble, despite a good season on the field because the Borough Council bunged the property speculator owner a £12million loan to re-build a stand and start developing the land round the back for his own profit.The stand not being built and the players not paid, the business-friendly council has started bleating it wants its money back.Suckers! Meanwhile, the Club faces a winding-up order.
@S
Naturally I do not include contributors to this blog in my comments about low paying businesses: anybody with enough social and economic conscience to take an interest in LVT is going to be aware of all the issues around wages and the factors that reduce their spending power.
I have not run a small business but my father was Managing Director of a substantial limited company.He battled for years against the dishonesty of other firms who competed for contracts by bribing local government officials.He tendered at below cost but did not get a look-in .He was eventually ruined by the Clore era of takeovers which destroyed British equivalents of the Mittelstand in Germany. Formerly a leading Conservative councillor, he died a Socialist warning me off the public sector.
There is never any public recognition of the sheer number of fiddles and frauds in the private sector, which I was overwhelmed by when trying to sort out his estate and that of his father who ,as mayor, got British Cellophane to rescue Bridgwater .Needless to say private sector fiddles and frauds swiped the lot.
NB should be "warning me off the private sector" above.
"But all British business seems to want to do is cut wages and then watch while the home market is supplied by the efforts of cheap Asiatic labour."
If you are running a business and are being undercut by cheap Asiatic labour you have two options once you are no longer making a profit, AFAICS, either pay your own staff less (including yourself, unless as the owner, you are paid from the now non-existent profits and therefore are earning bugger all already) or wind the company up, depriving all your workers of employment. Which would you suggest?
@DBC
Phew.... probably take more time than I have right now to answer that lot.
Be aware.... I worked for 'smell' in Bridg and as I write this I can see the Quantock hills from my office window.... so I can safely say that, with respect to Cellophane 'private sector fiddles and frauds swiped the lot' is about as far from the truth as you could get.
TTFN
@S
The fate of the "smell" in Bridgwater was just part of a personal beef about my grandfather ,the mayor's, estate being swiped by private sector fraudsters, leaving my father skint just when private sector predators took over the firm he ran.
British Cellophane started as a huge public-private partnership with the public sector building the Durleigh reservoir to supply the works with water .I am not aware of why the smell went bust but I always assumed it was because of the rise of polythene( though cellophane is biodegradeable),and because of private sector shilly-shallying and production being moved abroad as usual, though this time USA not Poland.
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