Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth Blighty's Business Secretary Vince Cable pulled back the curtains on his new biz investment bank this morning. While outlining plans for the state-backed pile 'o public cash, which would provide capital to companies, the Liberal Democrat minister efforts so far to kickstart the economy were laissez-faire - and said his bank …
The few hundred million being toyed with here is rather dwarfed by the £9bn a year Gormless Dave chooses to fritter on foreign aid to countries we increasingly compete with.
And equally strange that my taxes are being used to gift money to scumbucket snout-in-the-public-trough companies like BAe, or foreign owned and managed outfits like Siemens, whose shareholders will surely be delighted. If these companies want people trained, they should pay for it, not me.
If we don't give 3rd World dictators £9bn a year how are they going to afford BAe's products?
ps. "foreign owned" doesn't really mean anything for a listed company. Shockingly anyone, even foreigners, are allowed to buy shares in BAe, and honest stout hearted English yeomen are allowed to buy Siemens stock.
"If we don't give 3rd World dictators £9bn a year how are they going to afford BAe's products?"
Under Saints Tony and Dave we've largely abandoned this practice, although given the apparently declining market of third world despots that may not really matter. When dealing with democracies the results are often different, eg we give £300m a year to India, they laugh in our face when we try and sell them some Eurofighters. Personally I'd laugh in the face of a Eurofighter salesman too, but then I'm not receiving hundreds of millions sucked from the unwilling pocket of British taxpayers.
The point on foreign owned I'll concede, but in terms of "foreign managed" my case still stands, as European companies prefer their countrymen as suppliers and business partners where possible, and the corporate centre will itself be a major contributer to the local economy.
I personally don't care if the company is foreign owned and foreign managed (all the profits are neatly siphoned abroad even for British companies to avoid tax) but its whether the company employ British tax payers to make the goods that is the most important.
The (previous Labour) government bought several BMW's for ministers to be driven around in. That was several hundred thousand tax payer pounds taken from the UK and used to bolster jobs, investment and lower taxes in Munich. If they had spent that much on Jaguar's then Jaguar would have employed some more Brits - saving us a stack of unemployment money, housing benefits, cheap prescriptions and probably even cut the 'I'm bored out of my mind' crime figures. Then the employed would have paid some of the money back as tax. They would have spent some of the rest buying food, clothes and maybe even houses around the factory.... Jaguar could also have invested in some R&D and might have sold even more abroad.... It is really NO coincidence that if you go to Germany ALL the police vehicles, fire engines, buses, ministerial cars etc. are made in Germany. Or if you go to France you'll find their equivalents were made in France, or Italy, or Spain.........
We give hundreds of billions to non-productive bankers
We give billions to China, India and other similar places
We buy billions and billions of foreign goods (BMW's for ministers, BMW's for the Olympics, BMW's for the Met, Mercedes for my council workers vans, Italian gym kit for the council owned gym, Chinese plates for the royal wedding, American planes for the airforce and navy, American companies for our census, French companies to interview the disabled........ the list goes on and on)
Then they offer a few million to support UK workers and UK jobs ... but doubtless there will be hundreds of pages of documents to fill in first, a near zero chance of actually getting the money.
They wont' change the purchasing by mere words - mainly because the reason for the purchasing boils down to the backhanders - often of course in 'fact finding trips'
Its sounds like a good thing to spend some money on engineering, but from the nationalisation days onwards it has always been hopelessly misdirected. It is only the dinosaur industries that can be bothered to fill out the paperwork. How surprised am I that 'our' prime merchants of death, BAE, look to be first in the queue? They want to train more apprentices, then guess what, they'll be wanting orders or all these new puppies will have to be drowned.
I say we should use the money to retrain them to design working, fixed-cost, fixed timescale competitive products for the commercial market - skills they lack in abundance at present.
I maintain that every engineer that crosses onto the dark side costs the country all of the useful things they might otherwise have made. They are a finite resource, let's get them making great new things that don't, intentionally at least, kill people.
"I maintain that every engineer that crosses onto the dark side costs the country all of the useful things they might otherwise have made. "
You're right there! Nuclear tanks to Mars, no problem.
Toast done evenly and reliably? Not a chance.
Vacuum cleaning to the edge, quietly, reliably without clogged filters or bits dropping off? Sorry, not today sir.
Mobile phone that you can put in your pocket and has a battery life of a month? Maybe you could call back.
I'm sure the rest of you can contribute examples of devices badly in need of real engineers?
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