Wednesday 27 August 2014

Businessmen should stay out of politics

The secret ballot was introduced to prevent electors being intimidated by their employers in election ballots. Landowners were particularly known for this practice particularly with their tenant farmers. In Ireland this perversion of democracy fueled the Irish independence movement which succeeded in 1920 and delivered an independent state.

This same practice is currently going on in the Scottish referendum and will re-occur if we ever get an In/Out EU referendum. Richard North, http://www.eureferendum.com/ , has picked up on this in his blog and his piece is well worth reading. 

These businessmen are of course only interested in their profits and bonus. The easiest way for them to achieve this is to cut their labour costs and the easiest way to do that is to employ immigrant labour hence their oft repeated claims that immigration is good for the economy. Social housing costs, health care, education for immigrant's children are not on the business profit and loss account but they jolly well should be!

More puzzling is why the media and the BBC in particular give these self seeking money grubbing creeps so much air time. I opine it is because these big firms provide a nice little earner for these equally greedy media types. Its not just the adverts but its these nice little conferences, training days etc are all very lucrative for TV types and of course z list politicians but paid for by these businessmen's company shareholders.

Its never going to be possible to legislate for this abuse of our democratic process but at least it deserves some publicity from the media who are not in big business' back pocket.

4 comments:

Edward Spalton said...

There is also a less sinister motive for businesses to prefer the status quo.

There are enough uncertainties in running a business without having the whole fabric of legislation and development of regulation over forty years thrown into doubt and disarray.
Businesses have paid a great deal of money in complying with all this.

Eric Edmond said...

Agreed in part but that is an argument for never changing anything. I would also say change should involve less regulation.

Edward Spalton said...

Eric,

Punch used to do very elaborate cartoons, full of character and comic incident. One was of a parish visitation with the Bishop being introduced to the oldest inhabitant.
" My word" he says " You must have seen some changes in your time"
" I has" says the old gaffer "Indeed I has and I've been agin every one o'them".

I'm beginning to feel more and more like that old chap!

There is a difference between " natural" additive change and the sort of total radical experience we had in the grain trade when we joined the EEC and went from free trade to a highly regulated "fortress Europe" system which also required mill lay-outs to be altered for purposes of regulatory supervision . Not a few of the older grain traders simply couldn't cope with the complexities and retired.

Eric Edmond said...

I was in Liverpool in 1975 and saw the port undermined by the switch of trade from deep sea West facing to short sea East facing with containers and bulk cargoes going to Rotterdam for trans-shipment in smaller ships to the East coast ports.

The dockers and the trade unions of course were the major factor in Liverpool's decline but the EEC entry gave them an excuse for strikes etc.