Here is the text of the Offending letter that the CBI 35 signed.
This text is taken from the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative Party's in-house rag.
Addressing the debt problem in a decisive way will improve business and consumer confidence. Reducing the deficit more slowly would mean additional borrowing every year, higher national debt, and therefore higher spending on interest payments.
The cost of delay would result in almost £100 billion of additional national debt by the end of this parliament alone. In the end, the result would be deeper cuts, or further tax rises, in order to pay for the extra debt interest.
The cost of delay could be even greater than this. As recent events in some European countries have demonstrated, if the markets lose faith in Britain, interest rates will rise for all of us.
There is no reason to think that the pace of consolidation envisaged in the Budget will undermine the recovery.
The private sector should be more than capable of generating additional jobs to replace those lost in the public sector, and the redeployment of people to more productive activities will improve economic performance, so generating more employment opportunities.
So, each writing in our personal capacity, we would encourage George Osborne and the Government to press ahead with his plans to reduce the deficit.
In the long run it will deliver a healthier and more stable economy.
While these 'business leaders' sit confortably in their boardrooms the lives of millions of working people are being ruined. Let us make the Conservatives' claim that 'we are all in this together' come true. Let's share our pain with those supporting those who cause it by boycotting their stores and products.
Actually, it seems to me that the CEOs of the vast majority of these companies should be under fire not from consumers but from shareholders.
ReplyDeleteYou don't need to be an economist, or even a particularly bright individual, to know that these cuts are going to create unemployment, depress the economy still further and reduce consumer spending. That will clearly be bad for companies like M&S, Asda, Next, Mothercare and Diageo.
The only plausible explanation is that the CEOs involved put their own desire for lower personal income taxes ahead of their fiduciary responsibility. That's fine, self-interest is the core value of capitalism, but they should have signed this letter as individuals, not as CEOs of companies that will suffer when the recession double dips.
Hi - I've put a link to your blog in my sidebar, so that should help you rise in the search results.
ReplyDeleteCan I give you some advice? You need to do an indvidual blog post on every single business involved with title "Boycott XYZ business". In teh post give details of why - eg this snippet for Alliance Boots (taken from wikipedia) "Alliance Boots was initially a British plc listed on the London Stock Exchange. In 2007 it was bought out in a private equity transaction. In 2008 the trading business was transferred to a Swiss GmbH, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a British company, AB Acquisitions Holdings Limited, which is owned by the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and the Italian businessman Stefano Pessina", and explain why you object to this sort of tax dodging.
Then you need to submit each blog post to the social networking sites - Digg, reddit, Mixx and so on.
The idea is to make sure that each post ranks for the name of the business concerned - so that when people Google "Boots", they find your page in the search results.
Good luck and I hope your blog goes viral.
Thanks for the support and for the ideas.
ReplyDeleteSnowflake - I'll try that 'page per business ' idea.
@ snowflake5. Great input.
ReplyDelete