Industry - for discussion at COPOV meeting

British Industry a personal view on the decline of British Industry.

                    This paper was prepared by  Cllr Mr Allan Glass     

                                 For presentation to   C.O.P.O.V.   

Preface.

Looking back to the Industrial revolution and on through Victorian times Britain has flourished at times when industry was at its strongest.   Britain once led the world in industrial and manufacturing methods and machinery developments, this brought great prosperity and meaningful employment to the workforce.    Commerce banking and general trade has at times made Britain although small in land mass a prosperous country and enabled the spread of industry throughout the commonwealth and the world.

Inventions and expertise are the strength of the industrial heritage Britain has developed.

Manufacturing industry

Manufacturing industry requires highly skilled and trained workers as well as operators of machines.   The UK used to have most industries from ship building to electronics but recently it has been transferred to foreign countries due to industrial costs and taxes. 

The UK could regain its position within world industry with the right conditions and political outlook.    We have the engineers and designers as clearly displayed by the fact that most formula one racing teams are based in the UK.     Factories take a lot of space therefore the capitol cost of setting up a factory would make the UK not cost effective but the UK could be the development area for products made where manufacturing is less expensive.

Investment in industry should be encouraged as it could bring employment and financial reward.   

During my career I have worked in several types of engineering business improving quality and throughput and this took me around the world.  One thing I noted was in developing countries such as India all types of qualification and experience are appreciated and rewarded.   In Germany where industry is still profitable to work as an engineer the correct qualifications are required before you can even call yourself an engineer.        In the UK we say we will call an engineer to fix our washing machine, it is this lack of understanding of the training and experience required to earn the title engineer that is one reason why our universities have so few engineers in training. 

To re-develop our industry we need leader’s free thinkers and investors all to understand what the manufacturing industry entails.  Our industries could be very high tech with the right backing and promotion.

Gone are the dark satanic mills of old our industry but we should use the resources we have in abundance and that is our younger generation of students and industrialists.

Current industrial development within the UK.

In recent years the UK has been used as a resource by several foreign investors taking over ailing companies and redeveloping them to use British respected company names like Rolls Royce, Bently, Jaguar and Land Rover to sell products made in the UK but by companies with foreign owners.    Nissan and Honda have set up companies from green fields and used the UK work force skills to make high quality cars but again the ownership and therefore the profit has been foreign. 

From Southampton near where I live UK built cars are shipped all over the world some even to within the EU this trading on the UK reputation for quality and recently good industrial relations is a resource that UK investors should be taking advantage of.

Hope for the future

One company that had all but closed, Triumph Motor Cycles were underfunded in the late 50,s and early 60,s their products were left behind as obsolete and old fashioned with poor reliability.  Triumph was purchased by a UK investor and the company has been reinvigorated with traditional models brought up to date and new models all of high quality and the company is one of the most rapidly growing motor cycle companies in the world.

With this brief and very personal statement the question I would like answered by the UK now is where do we go from here.

Allan Glass

Lord Tebbit gets it right on Party membership

In an article for Brietbart Ben Harris-Quinney wrote on March 25th:

The Bow Group, the UK's oldest conservative think-tank, hosted a “State of the Party” lecture last week, delivered by Lord Tebbit. The Thatcher-era cabinet minister expressed a desire to see a change of leadership so we can feel like conservatives again and feel like the Prime Minister is “a son of Thatcher and not a son of Tony Blair”. But he felt there was a more important consideration; the extent to which a future leader is willing to enfranchise the party membership:

“We need a leadership with an attachment to the grassroots, and one that spends less time on focus groups and opinion polls and much more establishing a network of constituency associations and agents to rebuild the membership.

"When eventually it comes to choosing the next leader, it’s not about whether we go left or right, but whether we will be a top down, narrowly focused party run by an elite, or a bottom up party run by like-minded, anti-statist minded people.”

After a disastrous decade of party membership, another 10 years of the same would ensure that the Conservative Party ceases to exist. An ideological conservative won’t be enough. Tories also need a leader who is willing to drive freedom and democracy within the Conservative Party for the long term, pushing power down and out through local Tory branches, and empowering and attracting members.

COPOV FORUM

Our next Forum will be on 12th April.   See "Events" in right hand column for details.

Tax avoidance - can we afford it? updated 31 Mar 2014

At the last COPOV Forum there was a discussion about tax avoidance.   The discussion was about legal tax avoidance and relied on examples from Richard Brooks book "The Great Tax Robbery".   The big question is "Is it fair?"   Over the next few weeks we will set out some examples and why nothing is being done about it.   Consider the following:

(1) Prosecutions for evasion of direct taxes (like income tax) run at just thirty per year even though the offence is estimated by HMRC to cost around £5.5 billion annually.
(2) Following its takeover by a private equity group in 2007 Boot's tax payments halved as the new owners loaded the company up with billions of pounds of debt on which it now makes tax deductible payments.   As a result, out of operating profits of £1 billion in 2010/11, the now Swiss-controlled group paid just £59 million in tax.
(3) Barclays has over 300 tax haven subsidiary companies, 181 of them in the Cayman Islands. 
(4) In 5 years from 2006 the Revenue put just eight corporation tax schemes - all of which took place before the end of 2003 - before the tax tribunal that is the first step in the legal process.
(5) Foreign football players - as "non-doms" they can keep their image rights offshore in a tax haven company entirely untaxed.  Share schemes for bonuses are more valuable to non-dom players who can leave them offshore.   The same net wage for a foreign player thus costs a club far less than it does a native one.   So for the same total cost the club can get a better overseas player.   This goes some way to explaining why the Premier League had just 11 non-British or Irish players in 1992 but by 2007 it had 250.
(6) In 2006 accountants Grant Thornton estimated that in the previous year Britain's fifty-four billionaires, mostly non-doms, paid tax of £15 million on combined fortunes of £126 billion.
(7) By 2010 penalties for fraudulent or negligent understatements of income charged on all 770 companies dealt with by the Revenue's Large Business Service had dropped to £0.4 million, or around 0.01% of the tax they had underdeclared on their tax returns.
(8) Public Buildings and Territory of Ownership
      HMRC Tax Offices            Bermuda
      HM Treasury                     Jersey
      Home Office                      Guernsey
      Ministry of Defence            Guernsey
(9) Research suggests that developing countries lose at least $50 billion per year and perhaps as much as $280 billion in corporate profit sharing (i.e. avoidance) and evasion by individuals. Total worldwide annual aid to developing countries is around $100 billion.

Labour or Conservative

One of my friends told me the following:

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in my front garden, my neighbours stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog.
During our friendly conversation I asked their little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to be Prime Minister someday.

Both of her parents, Labour Party members, were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied... "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people."

Her parents beamed with pride!

"Wow...what a worthy goal!" I said. "But you don't have to wait until you're Prime Minister to do that!" I told her.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

So I told her, "You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull out the weeds, and trim my hedge,

and I'll pay you £50. Then you can go over to the shop, where the homeless guy hangs out,

and you can give him the £50 to use toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked,

"Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the £50?"

I said, "Welcome to the Conservative Party."

Her parents aren't speaking to me anymore

Local Democracy?

The following article appeared in Private Eye last week.

"A surreal lesson in how democracy works - or doesn't - from Herefordshire.

County councillors were unanimous earlier this month in reversing a cut imposed by the council's cabinet in the provision of free school buses for hundreds of children across the county.   Even the cabinet members voted against their earlier decision.   Yet days later the council announced: "This... does not change the policy position for home to school transport set by cabinet in December, which will take effect in September 2014."

Officers told gobsmacked councillors the cuts would go ahead without any further reference to them.   They explained that under local government legislation the decision of the cabinet, once made could not be un-done."

Even in parliament members can overturn a decision of the cabinet.   Why can't councils?

Thirsk and Malton selection update

Martin Vander Weyer is a member of the Thirsk and Malton Constituency Association.   In the article printed below he sets out the role of the Party's Regional Office.   What were they playing at?   Are they so incapable that they let this breech of the Party's constitution go through.   Questions need to be asked and answers given.

Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator:

"How dirty were the tricks?   The chief allegation was that in 2012, Chairman Steveney (a former cavalry officer and Jockey Club official) expanded the association’s executive council to include representatives of electoral wards that did not have active Conservative branches.   The panel quoted a rule that ‘representation should be “from each Ward or Polling District branch” (not from each Ward or Polling District)’, and said the rule was ‘designed to prevent an unrepresentative “takeover” of an executive council’, a phrase much quoted after the leaked publication; but the panel did not suggest Steveney had attempted such a takeover.   It simply said he had misinterpreted the rules and must go through the restructuring exercise and -reselection vote a second time.

Steveney and his colleagues’ rebuttal, now also in the public domain, never received a response from party HQ.   It pointed out that the panel had ignored the role of regional officials who advised on the restructuring, and the fact that a senior party agent, Maurice Cook, had not called it out of order when challenged to do so at the AGM."

The members have spoken

In a ballot of the members of the Thirsk and Malton Conservative Association the result was a majority in favour of de-selecting Anne McIntosh as the Conservative candidate for the 2015 General Election.   The Constituency association  has 560 members and 88% of them voted.
Anne Mackintosh says this is a small cabal trying to get rid of her, but it does not look so small.   She has also said that she may fight the seat as an Independent.   Of course if she does so, against the official Conservative candidate she could find herself together with any Party members that support her, subject to disciplinary procedures of the Party leading to their expulsion from the Conservative Party
Thank heavens for the "wisdom of the crowd".

Re-selection of MP - Another fine mess.

Thirsk and Malton re-selection.

Looking at the leaked report it looks as though the local Association has made a bit of a mess of the re-selection process, but it does raise a number of points:

a) What were the Area and Regional officers doing when the Association changed its rules at the Extraordinary General Meeting?

b) Did they make the Association aware that the rule changes were in breach of the Party's constitution?

c) Why didn't Anne McIntosh reply to the Executive Council?   Does the Party's Constitution need amending so that there is a time limit for reply in these circumstances?

d) Why is the Internal Inquiry Report secret?   After all they were working in a semi-judicial capacity.   Justice should be seen to be done.

e)Why has no reply been sent to the Association Chairman?   Common courtesy demands a reply should be sent.

The following report appeared in the Yorkshire Post on 27th January:

A SECRET Conservative Party report has revealed serious allegations of dirty tricks and subterfuge within a North Yorkshire Conservative association as local party bosses try to force out the region’s only female Tory MP.

The Yorkshire Post can reveal Conservative Party chairman Lord Feldman ordered an internal inquiry into allegations of wrongdoing at the Thirsk and Malton Conservative Association, whose leadership is involved in a long-running de-selection battle with the sitting MP, Anne McIntosh.

The inquiry’s findings, suppressed by the party but published today for the first time, conclude that local Tory leaders broke party rules by co-opting a large number of new appointees onto the Thirsk and Malton association’s executive board, shortly before a crunch meeting last year where it voted not to re-select Miss McIntosh as Tory candidate for the 2015 general election.

Supporters of Miss McIntosh privately described the affair as “our very own Falkirk” – a reference to the vote-rigging row which tore the Labour Party apart last year as it sought a new candidate for a safe seat in Scotland.

While there is no suggestion of any criminal activity, the report is heavily critical of the Thirsk and Malton association and its chairman, retired Army Major and racehorse owner Peter Steveney – a fierce opponent of Miss McIntosh. Mr Steveney and his associates were hauled in to Conservative Party headquarters for heated discussions in the wake of its findings. Their de-selection vote was judged “fundamentally flawed”.

“The association wrongly sought to re-configure the composition of its executive council in the manner it did,” the inquiry found in July 2013. “The constitution of the party makes no provision for such arrangements, or empowers an association to do so.”

The report found the newly-appointed members of the executive “were clearly co-options by any other name”.

It said the rules broken were specifically designed “to prevent an unrepresentative takeover of an executive council”.

It also criticised a letter Mr Steveney subsequently wrote to party members as “unhelpful and detrimental to Miss McIntosh’s position, and unfair to her”.

Mr Steveney rebuts the report’s findings, however, describing them as “totally one-sided”. He insists he acted within party rules and has demanded an apology from Lord Feldman.

Thirsk and Malton remains a true-blue Conservative heartland and one of England’s most rural seats, with a Tory majority of more than 11,000.

The bitter dispute lays bare once more the disconnect between Conservative Party headquarters and its grassroots associations, as David Cameron’s attempts to modernise the party continue. Last May, just three weeks after ordering the inquiry into Thirsk and Malton, Lord Feldman – a tennis partner of Mr Cameron – was forced to publicly deny describing Tory associations as “all mad, swivel-eyed loons”.

Tory members given access to the secret report were warned any breach of confidentiality would lead to disciplinary action, and possible expulsion from the party.

However, the Yorkshire Post was able to download a copy from the website of an award-winning bed-and-breakfast in the North York Moors. Its owner, a prominent local Conservative and supporter of Miss McIntosh, removed the document yesterday afternoon.

“In the wider interests of the Conservative Party we decided not to take issue with the report at the time, but to get on and follow its recommendations,” Mr Steveney said last night.

“But I thought the report was a travesty. We wrote to the party asking for an apology in July, and They still have not replied.

“And that, I’m afraid, is absolutely typical of the way they ignore the voluntary party.”

The initial de-selection vote has now been declared null and void, and a ballot of local party members called instead, with a decision due on Friday. If Miss McIntosh is forced out, David Cameron will lose one of just three female Tory MPs covering the whole of the North of England.

Mr Cameron wants to increase the number of women Tory MPs from its current 16 per cent level – half that of Labour’s – but has been frustrated by the reluctance of local associations to select women candidates. Furthermore, four of his 2010 intake of female MPs have either resigned or announced they will not stand again.

Miss McIntosh’s supporters claim elements of her local association “never wanted” a female MP – part of the reason for the long-running whispering campaign against her. This is hotly denied by her opponents, who accuse her 
of being “impossible” to work with.

But in unguarded comments, one senior local party figure referred to the MP as “a silly little girl” and made clear the sort of candidate he would prefer.

“Let’s have an open selection and see who else would like to be MP,” he said. “We might get Boris (Johnson) – that would be rather fun, wouldn’t it? Or Nigel Farage?”

A more likely candidate than the Ukip leader could be Edward Legard, a local judge and Ryedale councillor. A Tory candidate in 2010, Coun Legard is on the party’s national list again – but has yet to declare which seat he will fight.

Earlier this month he was forced to deny his involvement in a letter-writing campaign against Miss McIntosh after his name appeared ‘by accident’ on an email sent to local newspapers.

The letter, signed by two prominent local Conservative businessmen, warned of the “poisonous” atmosphere within Thirsk and Malton Conservatives, and called on Miss McIntosh to be replaced.

Mr Legard could not be reached for comment last night.

Miss McIntosh also declined to comment, stating she would not “provide a running commentary”.

The Conservative Party said it would not comment on a leaked report.

SE Cambridgeshire Tories sweep mess under the carpet.

The South East Cambridgeshire Tories have voted to sweep the mess they made of the selection of their parliamentary candidate under the carpet and Tory Central Office have washed their hands of it.   No one has denied the facts of the case so we can only assume that they are correct, so why haven't the Tories re-run the selection process?   Disgraceful conduct has been piled on disgraceful conduct.   The officers of the local Association should resign.   They couldn't run a whelk stall, let alone a campaigning organisation. 

The following is as reported in the Independent on Sunday 12th January 2014:

Lucy Frazer, a barrister, was "reaffirmed" as Conservative candidate for South East Cambridgeshire on Friday despite claims that she had been beaten in an open primary by another woman, Heidi Allen, last month.

Despite calls for the local party to rerun the vote, the South East Cambridgeshire Conservative association voted to "reaffirm" Ms Frazer as their candidate. Her Labour opponent claimed it would always be suspected Mrs Frazer was the "second-choice" candidate for the constituency. The decision to appoint her also undermines the legitimacy of the open primary process, which Mr Cameron has held up as an example of his party's effort to rebuild trust in politics.

Although Conservative headquarters were insisting the vote was a matter for the local party, the selection of Mrs Frazer has ramifications for the Prime Minister because he is under pressure to increase the number of Tory women in Parliament. Only a third of candidates selected for key target seats in 2015 so far are female. While both contenders for the seat were female, lingering doubts about Mrs Frazer's selection will overshadow the quest to increase the tally of women.

Last month, South East Cambridgeshire Conservatives held an open primary, in which anyone, rather than only members of the party, can cast their vote, to replace the current MP James Paice, who is retiring. In the final run-off, Ms Allen, an astrophysicist and St Albans district councillor, was beaten by Mrs Frazer by 84 votes to 48. But the controversy erupted last week amid claims that Ms Allen's result was far lower than had been expected. When a local party official took the ballot papers home for an informal recount, the result was wrong, it was alleged, and 23 votes for Ms Allen had been mistakenly awarded to Mrs Frazer.

Because the official had taken the ballot papers home, the local association's president Brian Ashton deemed the entire count invalid, and an emergency meeting was called, amid demands for a recount.

Steve Tierney, a Wisbech Conservative town councillor, wrote on the Conservative Home website: "What a mess! Seems bizarre it could even happen. Every count I've ever seen has been scrupulous."

Yet on Friday evening, at a stormy meeting in Ely, the local association voted to reaffirm Mrs Frazer in the interests of "party unity", according to the local newspaper, the Wisbech Standard.

Conservative Campaign Headquarters refused to comment on the dispute, saying only: "This was a local association matter that has now been resolved by them." It is believed the local association will put out a statement this weekend.

Mrs Frazer, a graduate of Cambridge University, is a QC, state school governor and a mentor for children from low-income families. She has two children with her husband, David. After her selection in December she said she was "thrilled", adding: I hope to bring my experience of working with a wide range of businesses to increase growth. I am interested in improving state education in the constituency and the road and rail infrastructure. I am looking forward to working with and for everyone in the constituency."

She could not be contacted for comment last night.