George Pitcher

Views

Former spin doctor George Pitcher writes:

I gather that the slightly mysterious Multinational Chairmen's Group (MCG) has this week lobbied Blair with the fairly unequivocal message that he had better pull his finger out over industrial policy or they will move their principal operations out of the UK. In the slightly quirky way in which the British name things, this "chairmen's" group also includes chief executives, but Blair will be assured that he is dealing with the very top of our industrial hierarchy. The line-up is said to include BP and Shell, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, Vodafone, British American Tobacco, Rio Tinto, HSBC and Unilever.

This isn't exactly the equivalent of Spain's Opus Dei, but Blair will have been in no doubt that he is fac-ing the British industrial equivalent of the Mob. These are people who, collectively, can call the economic shots, if they so wish, just as effectively as the trades unions did back in the Seventies. And it seems that they are heartily sick of a spin-culture in which presentational lip-service is paid to free-market economics, while industry is concurrently burdened with intrusive regulation and ever- higher taxes.

Among their gripes, they claim that the (now diluted) corporate- governance guidelines of former in-vestment banker Derek Higgs have disfranchised chairmen; that public spending is inefficient and wasteful; that, as a consequence, the transport infrastructure is hopeless and getting worse; that non-domiciliary executives are discriminated against and that new caps on personal-pension provision are a hidden super-tax. The threat is that, since Blair's Government has created a hostile environment in which to do business, multinational companies will find somewhere more agreeable to base their operations unless some political olive branches are extended.