Friday, November 01, 2013

The business of government is business

While still a member of the opposition Cameron railed against the lobbyists and cronyism.

Welsh MEP Kay Swinburne during the first half of this year had a total of 57 meetings with “lobbyists”. Some 53 of those discussions were either directly with banks — including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and HSBC — or with firms and organizations involved in or funded by the financial services industry. In the last six months of 2010, for example, she held over 90 meetings with lobbyists. All of them were from the private sector.

In an unusual move, the Prime Minister invited the six bosses on his taskforce to address the full Cabinet. They are Marc Bolland, chief executive at Marks & Spencer; Ian Cheshire, chief executive at Kingfisher; Glenn Cooper, managing director at ATG Access;  Louise Makin, chief executive at BTG;  Dale Murray, an entrepreneur and angel investor and Paul  Walsh, former chief executive at Diageo.

The Taskforce proposals are a guarantee to female employees 20 weeks of maternity leave on full pay would have to be binned in the name of “competitiveness”. Bosses would be given more flexibility to pressurise employees into working longer hours.

 And a raft of anti-pollution rules would be weakened or abandoned such as abandoning plans to force small firms to pay fees to collect and transport waste and streamlining a rule on chemicals.  It also calls on the EU not to bring forward any legislative proposals on shale gas. Cameron will urge EU leaders to ditch tough new food labelling rules proposed in the wake of the horse meat scandal.

The task force wants the commission to abandon plans to force businesses to pay for the retraining of redundant staff.The proposals include scrapping the requirement for small firms in low-risk sectors to keep written health and safety assessments. 

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