A lively business culture and the spirit of enterprise breathe life into any society and they need governments to create room for them to grow.

But it cannot be a ‘take and take;’ relationship.

In return for the business nursery, maintenance subsidies and emergency services that governments provide, it is expected that businesses will take calculated risks to develop, will invest profit in their own growth and will have a care to the social responsibility their power confers.

It is not legitimate to expect the shelter of a low tax regime if there is no evidence of serious long term investment in business operations in the country concerned.

Most businesses pay as little tax as possible towards the cost of the services that they, in many cases, use more than most. We have recorded, in various reports, examples of the infamous results of legal tax avoidance in some of the UKs largest corporations. Such behaviour is nothing other than leaching off the poorest in society and off the working population from whom tax is deducted at source.

Iain MacMillan – Private Eye would say ‘Who he?’ and the answer is that he is Director of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Scotland – has tuned up a New Year fugue of complaint against the Scottish Government.

The former banker (’nuff said) has had a field day.

• He described the Government’s  criticism of the world’s biggest drinks business, Diageo, as ‘nothing short of scandalous’. Let’s remind ourselves what that ‘scandalous’ criticism was about. Diageo cut no fewer than 700 jobs out of Kilmarnock by closing the Johnny Walker bottling plant there; sacked another 200 from the Port Dundas plant in Glasgow; and replaced the 900 with 400 jobs in Fife – for the time being. Supposing the Scottish Government had not been critical of this?
• He criticised the cancellation of the Glasgow Airport Rail Link (GARL) , without, in common with his fellow critics of the decision, suggesting what transport project might have been dropped to make way for this one.
• He expressed the concerns of the business community at the Scottish Government’s determination not to countenance new build nuclear power stations in Scotland – despite the fact that neither the Scottish people nor politicians from across the parties do not want them. But business knows best and we all know why.
• He hammered the Government’s refusal to continue the use of PPP or PFI contracts to fund public sector infrastructural projects. And it’s not hard to see why that should be the business community’s position. Such contracts were hugely skewed in favour of the contractors, allowing them to make genuinely obscene profits at the expense of the taxpayer, running long into the future. The public sector debt burden from such schemes is such that, when the Scottish Government put a stop to them, it was estimated that every single person in Scotland from the newest-born infant to the most senior, had a debt of over £4,000 on their heads.
• He saved his strongest ire to the last. He reported that, at the SNP conference, Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, was overheard saying that she ‘would never put private profit before public services’. He intoned sonorously that this negativity had certainly been picked up by the business community. His line is that it is the taxes from private businesses that pay for public services. Right. That would be the £10  tax bill the Vestey family’s Dewhurst chain once paid in a single year,  courtesy of expensive tax accountants.

In terms of Ms Sturgeon’s alleged remark and Mr MacMillan’s shrill response to it- no government can responsibly put private profit before the public services it is elected to deliver. Also, Ms Sturgeon did not say that she would put public services before private profit. Had her words been listened to with less than a tin ear, it would seem that she was expressing an awareness of the balance that any capable government must hold between the two.

Related Posts

• Diageo’s ‘Alpha male whizzkid in braces from the 1980s’ caught with trousers down on Kilmarnock closure (0)
• Diageo story plant in Daily Mail backfires: was the Kilmarnock closure a failed blackmail attempt to protect vodka profits? (2)
• An attempt to sell Scottish Water will undermine Scottish futures and trust (4)
• Not a mention of Diageo in Sunday Herald focus on Scotch, vodka and growth (12)
• Banks and business, RBS and Diageo: The Empire Strikes Back (1)

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