Running to Stand Still

David Cameron's deeply embarrassing speech to CBI on Monday showed him to be more of a fawning amateur than a dignified PM.

He constantly brown-nosed the yawning audience of tailor made business suits and put on a pitiful display of frustrated urgency. He is no actor. He lacked confidence in his words and himself as he pretended he was just as ruddy sick as they were about all this blinking bureauracy.

He was so self-conscious of the impression he wanted to give (fast-moving, fast-talking) he looked more like a nervous new junior Minister out of his depth than an international statesman. His role was essentially to suck up to big business and to announce all the usual procedures to be followed when setting up new enterprises can go to hell, as long as new jobs are created.

He kept talking about finding a "spirit" (buccaneering, deal-making, hungry) when such a spirit, is a collective human creation which evolves spontaneously and cannot be expected to appear on demand. Even from such a powerful PM.

He also listed, with faux anger, the numerous barriers to progress which amounted to the minimum safeguards to prevent unfettered business from building roads through national parks and flattening communities to build even more supermarkets.

Dave derided consultations (asking the people affected), impact assessments (measuring what would happen to other businesses) and even audits (ensuring the money is spent correctly). "We don't need all this tick box stuff, " he fulminated. In other words, business interests should supercede the public interest.

He saved a special word for Judicial Reviews - that pesky process, administered by independent judges, which checks whether illegal decisions have been taken. It was Virgin's JR which revealed DoT's severe staff cuts had knobbled their ability to run a fair bidding process for West Coast Mainline.

"These are not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth." Well, no and I would suggest Victorian managerial style is not something we would all want to return to. In those good old days, corporate takeovers typically required sending platoons of troops on gunboats and availing ourselves of poorer nations' natural resources. That ship has sailed.

Cameron had already turned his urgency counter up to 11 but then went even higher by declaring Britain at war (economically) so it was completely justified to rip up the rule book just like we did when the Luftwaffe's planes were raging overhead.

All speechwriters should realise when they have to invoke Adolf Hitler then they have gone too far. PMs should also be more assured than raising panic when simply stronger leadership is required.

Knife at a Gunfight

When you are called to appear before a Congressional hearing or Parliamentary Committee what is the worst accusation you can face? That you were obstructive, wilfully ignorant? No, worse, by far, is to be deemed, “not serious”.


And so it was with Andrew Cecil, Public Policy Director for Amazon Europe when he was summoned before the Public Accounts Committee in Westminster to explain why his company pays next to no corporation tax in the UK.

His brief from his Amazonian masters was quite clear: maintain the line that the UK is simply one element of a European wide business based in Luxembourg. But his preparation clearly did not include identifying the ‘elephant traps’ which the committee, chaired by the formidable Margaret Hodge, may have sought to lure him into. Cecil clambered out of one and immediately fell into another in quite simply the most embarrassing, shambling performance I have ever seen in committee.

Business leaders often come ill-prepared to select committees and the assumption is that private industry only engages with Parliamentary scrutiny begrudgingly. It is as if the mere act of questioning their actions affords them a sense of superiority by dint of their role as “wealth creators” over these grubby public servants. The transparency of that business operation and its responsibility to pay its due to its ‘host’ nation were the points under examination here. How annoying then, for these pesky democratic representatives to be asking such damn impertinent questions.

In fact, the questions which were, on the face of it, the most straightforward seemed to the hardest for the hapless, bewildered Cecil to answer. Of the 9Bn Euro turnover in the European operations what was the sales volume for the UK? First, Cecil said he didn’t know then that it was not usual to disclose those confidential figures. He would have to check back. So who exactly was the holding company for Amazon Europe? No, didn’t know that. What, really? What’s your job title again? This incredible assertion was understandably followed by much spluttering and exclamations, “ridiculous...pathetic.”

Ms Hodge, was clearly losing her cool and when he asked to “check back” on the next six or seven questions she just flipped, “You come to us with absolutely no information…pretend ignorance…I don’t know what you take us for.” After that kind of lambasting, you don’t seek solace in strong drink: you find the closest bridge and throw yourself off.

What is so deeply dispiriting is that these tax arrangements similar to Google, Starbucks and most recently some UK water utilities were exposed by newspaper reports. The Government is always crowing about how it is cracking down on tax avoidance despite laying off thousands of tax inspectors. These are just weasel words: the truth is that officials inside Her Majesty’s Treasury know full well what level of tax these huge companies are paying yet there appears no urgency to seek to upset the status quo.

As if we needed reminding, the nation’s lower and middle classes are groaning under wage freezes, wholesale slashing of public services and support benefits. To see millionaires and multi-nationals blithely refuse to face the same rule book and neither are they compelled to do so, is a rank injustice.

Successive Governments in the UK and many other countries have allowed the creation of an effective “accountocracy” where the creation of favourable jurisdictions mean multinationals can rely on the benefits of a nation’s infrastructure and skills of its workforce and then suck up all the profits for its owners.

Besides calling the more “credible” senior executives from the tax haven of Luxembourg, the Public Accounts Committee must next call in the finance ministers and ask what they intend to do about it.

I fear the answer will be the familiar lament: all bluster and do bugger all.



Failure to Comunicate

Mitt Romney, for all his serial gaucheness, did not forget to be gracious in defeat.

But that may be one of the last moments of dignity for a while for the GOP who are a wasted party with high ambition but low prospect of gaining executive power.

The previous victory for President Obama prompted a tsunami of hysterical drivel from the right merely entrenching themselves in their own bitterness and winning over no independents.

For example, there was Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist and organising a huge march on Washington on the anniversary of Dr King's great speech. This time around there was Donald Trump calling for "revolution" against the "tyrany" when he couldn't do the math and thought Obama had lost the popular vote like Bush did in 2000.

But aside from the blind anger there was an explicit strategy. Minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell (pictured), was honest enough to admit his sole aim was not to pass laws for the good of the country but to make Obama a "one term President." Guess that didn't go so well Mitch, eh.

The Republicans have a severe dependency on white, male, Christian, middle and upper income voters and it is a dwindling constituency. President Obama won hands down with women and latinos as well black, Asian, Jewish and gay voters. The latino caucus incapsulates the GOP's dilemma perfectly: a group who would be natural Republicans but who are turned away by demonising immigration policy such as the series of semi racist measures carried out by Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona and Congress's stonewall blocking of a pathway to citizenship for millions.

There is also a matter of party discipline which feels very laissez faire. Certainly any major party in Britain who had a candidate who would put the words "rape" and "legitimate" together would be sacked in minutes. But in Missouri Todd Akin actually stood as did Indiana's Richard Mourdock who thinks sexual violence is part of some divine plan. A bit of centralisation and muscle to control the party's image from these whack jobs would be one positive step forward for the Republicans.

But fundamantal reforms do not seem likely yet. The party has been rushing headlong to the right for over ten years and don't appear to have a rear view mirror on history. They are like the crash victims still stumbling silently from the car wreck.