250 + Companies to Leave UK for Holland Due to Brexit

According to yesterday’s I for Thursday, 24th January 2019, the Dutch are claiming that more than 250 firms currently based in the UK are planning to move across the North Sea to them due to Brexit. The article on page 10, entitled ‘More than 250 firms plan to relocate from UK to the Netherlands’ by Nigel Morris and Benjamin Butterworth began

More than 250 companies are looking to follow Sony by moving from the UK to the Netherlands because of Brexit, it emerged yesterday.

The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) said that scores of companies with UK headquarters had expressed interest in relocating, and the number was expected to rise.

Many business chiefs have been dismayed by Theresa May’s refusal to rule out leaving the European Union without an agreement, leaving Britain immediately operating on World Trade Organisation rules.

The article then goes on to list some of the companies moving. They were Sony, Panasonic, which moved last year, P&O, while the car maker Bentley was stockpiling parts.

It quote Michiel Bakhuizen of the NFIA as saying

“The number of businesses we are in contact with for a possible arrival is growing. At the start of 2017 it was 80. At the start of 2018 it was 150, and now it’s more than 250.

“This increase will continue and it is not strange, because there is great uncertainty at the moment in Britain. And if there’s one thing that’s bad for business, it’s uncertainty.”

One of Tweezer’s little minions said in reply that it was clear that companies around the world would continue to invest in Britain and its people. Against this was the Labour MP Rupa Huq, who backs a second referendum. She said

“This shows the shrinking appeal of Britain as a decision-making base for top companies as a result of Brexit.

“The Japanese were supposed to be a top ally for Brexit, but time and again they have been shocked at the scale of self-destruction.” The below the article was another which also listed other firms leaving the UK. These included the Japanese financial houses Nomura Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group; HSBC, which is moving its HQ from London to Paris; Barclays and Bank of America, which are moving to Dublin, MoneyGram, which is going to Brussels; the European Medicines Agency, which is going to Amsterdam; the European Banking Authority is going to move to Paris, while the German engineering company Schaefler is going to close two of its plants, in Plymouth and Llanelli.

Brexit is going to be a disaster for Britain. but it’s going to be great for rich financiers like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage, because they can move their investments around the world without worrying about losing profits. It’s the rest of us, who depend on manufacturing and trade in goods for our jobs and businesses, who will take the real hit.

We were lied to by the leaders of the ‘Leave’ Campaign, who were chiefly members of the Tory right. Well, it’s high time to kick the Tories out of office and put in someone who really can clear up this mess: Jeremy Corbyn.

Florence on the Fabians and the Labour Right

Florence, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted this comment on the links between the Fabian Society and the Thatcherite entryists on the Labour right.

The Fabian Society is a small group, they say dedicated to networking, I call it as a closed shop for privilege, the white middle class, and the political dynasties. The Fabian Society has also been spotted hovering in the shadows with the Blairites, such as Benn and Kinnock, and especially those who seem to be trying to redefine feminism to their own liking, Jess Philips, Jo Cox, Tessa Jowell, Hariett Harman, to name but a few in Fabian Women’s section. They run a mentoring programme, and in their own words,

“The programme has already delivered some incredible results for its 125 participants and the Fabian Women’s Network. Mentees have been selected or shortlisted as Parliamentary candidates, as candidates for the London and Welsh Assembly with brilliant support from other mentees. Many others were shortlisted. 27 women have been elected into local government positions and a number of women have gone on to become school governors and trustees on the boards of charities. The majority has gained promotion, been nominated for awards and written or spoken in national media.”

Not bad for a society with only 6,000 members in total. A lot of influence for the few. Don’t get me wrong, women’s mentoring to prepare for public life is great, it’s just that an awful lot of the “parachuted” or more correctly imposed New Labour candidates into winnable Labour constituencies proves there is a link between THIS Fabian programme and the actual elected MPs, notably those who are very vocally anti- Corbyn and anti-Socialism. This also shows how far the webs reach between the PLP problems, and the disconnect with the actual membership and in the country. The graduates of the programme seem to know very little about the Labour movement or socialism, it’s aims and more about neo-liberalism as a “good thing”, and of course Corbyn as democracy as a “bad thing”.

https://fabianwomen.org.uk/fabian-women-mps/https://fabianwomen.org.uk/fabian-women-mps/

The source of Fabian Society funding also bears some inspection, where there are a number of corporate donors and sponsors are powerful lobbyists for corporate interests, and not known for their support for socialist ideals- such as Barclays and Lloyds banks, Bellendon PA (political lobbyists) the Portman Group (lobbyists for the drinks trade), Sanofi – a large pharmaceutical, and so on.

http://www.fabians.org.uk/about/how-we-are-funded/http://www.fabians.org.uk/about/how-we-are-funded/

This is depressing. The Fabians have always had a reputation for being ‘milk-and-water’ Socialists, but I used to have far more respect for them than I do today. I was briefly a member of the society back in the 1980s, when I felt I had to do something to stop the rampant privatisation under Maggie Thatcher. My great-grandfather had been a member, and I was impressed with the intellectual work they’d done. This was a time when there was still a variety of opinions in the Society. Indeed, one of the sources I’ve used for my blog posts and pamphlets against the privatisation of the NHS was a Fabian pamphlet by Robin Cook against it. It’s not just from Florence that I’ve heard about the Fabians forming part of the network of Blairite groups. A friend of mine also remarked on it, with the suggestion that if Corbyn wanted to destroy the Blairites, he could do much by simply expelling the Fabians.

It’s a profoundly depressing development for the organisation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and, briefly, H.G. Wells. The Webbs did much to promote Socialism in Britain, and their report on the state of British healthcare laid some of the foundations for the development of the NHS decades later. It’s now become a mouthpiece for the corporate shills trying to privatise everything, and break up that greatest of British institutions.

Medialens on the Bias against Jeremy Corbyn

Michelle, one of the many great commenters on this blog, sent me a link to the article, ‘Killing Corbyn’ at Media Lens, which describes the disgusting media bias against Jeremy Corbyn. This includes the fawning coverage of the coup plotters by Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, and her attempts to sneer at, belittle and disparage Corbyn’s leadership at whatever chance she gets; her statement that Tom Watson was telling Corbyn to resign, which he wasn’t; and then an entirely contrived story that Corbyn had been heckled at a Gay pride event. He had, but the heckler, Tom Mauchline, worker for Portland Communications, a PR firm which worked for the disgusting Liz Kendall, when she was campaigning for the leadership of the party. I think it was Kendall, who said that Labour would be even harder on those on benefits than the Tories. It’s strategic counsel is Alistair Campbell, Blair’s spin doctor and one of the New Labour clique that took us into the carnage of the Iraq invasion.

It goes on to discuss BBC News’ live feed, ‘the Corbyn Crisis and Brexit’, in which the vote to leave the EU is presented somehow as being a product of Corbyn’s leadership, and playing down the contemporary drama in the Tory party. The anti-Corbyn bias is strongly contrasted with the positive portraits of the two possible successors to Cameron, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. The Beeb isn’t the only section of the media hostile to Corbyn. The supposedly left-wing newspapers, the Guardian and Observer have also run hit pieces.

The nadir was reached with a piece in the Mail on Sunday by Dan Hodges, which was illustrated with a photoshopped image of Corbyn in a coffin under the headline ‘Labour MUST Kill Vampire Jezza’. When challenged, Hodge’s denied that he wrote the headline. He’s right – that’s done by the subeditors, but he didn’t reply when challenged if he actually objected to them.

The article provides further information on how the campaign against Blair in the Labour party is the work of the Blairites, desperate to hang on to their waning power. They’re doing so through Portland Communications, the PR firm, whose clients include a whole host of the usual multinational villains, like Nestle’s and Barclay’s. It’s also being supported by Left Foot Forward Ltd, a company run by Will Straw, the son of Jack Straw, one of the leading members of Blair’s government. Jack Straw also turned up recently as one of the leaders of Cameron’s inquiry into the Freedom of Information Act. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian, who was moaning that it was to liberal and too much information was now available to the public. The proles should instead shut up and just be grateful for what their masters deign to tell them. The article concludes that all of this is predictable, as Corbyn is a genuine threat to corporate power and the establishment, and they are doing everything they can to destroy him.

Monbiot’s List of the Corporate Politicos in Blair’s Government: Part One

Chapter six of George Monbiot’s book, Captive State, is entitled ‘The Fat Cats Directory’. The book is about the way big business has wormed its way into government, so that official decisions and policy reflects their interests, not those of Mr and Mrs British Public. In the ‘Fat Cats Directory’ he lists the businessmen and senior managers, who were rewarded with government posts by Tony Blair in May 1997. The list gives the name of the businessman, their ‘previous gluttony’ – a summary of their corporate careers, and ‘Subsequent Creamery’ – their posts in the British government. Those lists are:

Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge.–
Chairman of British Airways
– President of the Confederation of British Industry

– Put in charge of Gordon Brown’s energy tax review, and helped promote the government’s campaign against the Millennium Bug, even though his 1999 holiday brochures told customers that they wouldn’t be responsible for any problems caused by computers malfunctioning due to it.

Ewen Cameron

President of the County Landowners’ Association
Owner of 3,000 Acres in Somerset
Opponent of rambling.

Chairman of the Countryside Agency, concerned with tackling the right to roam, social exclusion in rural areas, and someone, who has very definitely contravened the Countryside Agency’s rules on the maintenance of footpaths.

Lord Rogers of Riverside

Architect of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 on greenbelt land
Architect of Montevetro Tower, London’s most expensive building.

Chairman of the government’s Urban Task Force.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville

Chairman of J. Sainsbury Plc
Chairman of the Food Chain Group
Principal backer of biotech company Diatech
Funded construction of the Sainsbury Laboratory for research into genetic engineering
Replaced skilled jobs with unskilled shelf-stacking.

Minister in Government’s department of trade and industry
Minister with responsibility for science and technology
As science minister, led Bioindustry Trade Delegation to US
Ultimate control over Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Chairman of the government’s University for Industry.

Lord Simon of Highbury

Chairman of BP
Vice-Chairman of European Round Table of Industrialists
Under his direction, BP assisted the Colombian government in forcing peasants off their lands, and imprisoning, killing and torturing trade unionists. Gave money to the 16th Brigade, notorious for murder, kidnapping torture and rape.

Minister for Trade and Competitiveness in Europe
One of the ministers responsible for implementing the ethical foreign policy.

Jack Cunningham MP

Adviser to agrochemical company Albright and Wilson (UK)
Member of Chemical Industries Association lobbying for deregulation of pesticides.

Secretary of State for Agriculture
Chair of Cabinet Committee on Biotechnology.

Sir Peter Davis

Chairman of Reed International, which made 900 workers unemployed.
Chief Executive of Prudential Corporation Plc, company most responsible for miss-selling pensions.

Appointed by Treasury head of New Deal Task Force.

John Bowman

Director of Commercial Union, which possibly miss-sold 7,900 pensions.

On the board of the Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority.

Lord De Ramsey

President of Country Landowners’ Association, sold part of his enormous Cambridgeshire estate for house building, and in doing so destroyed a pond of Great Crested Newts. Lobbies against regulatory burdens on agriculture. Grew genetically modified sugar beet on his land for Monsanto.

Chairman of Environmental Protection Agency.

Paul Leinster

Director of SmithKline Beecham (SB) Plc, which polluted streams in Sussex and Gloucestershire. Previously employed by BP and Schering Agrochemicals, part-owner of bio-tech company AgrEvo, which was publicly shamed for breach of environmental regulations for growth of GM crops.

Head of the Environment Agency’s Environmental Protection Directorate.

Justin McCracken

Managing director of ICI Katalco, responsible for a long list of plants polluting the environment with carcinogens. In 1999 it was listed as the worst polluting company in Europe, responsible for pouring 20 tonnes of hormone disrupting chemicals into the Tees. Also allowed 150 tonnes of chloroform to escape into groundwater at Runcorn. From 1996 to 1997 Friends of the Earth recorded 244 unauthorised pollution incidents from its Runcorn plant.

Regional General Manager, Environment Agency, North-West Region.

Dinah Nicols

Non-executive director, Anglia Water. In 1999 it was prosecuted six times for pollution.

Director-General of Environmental Protection at the Department of the Environment.

Ian McAllister

Chairman and managing director of Ford UK. The company was a member until December 1999, of the Global Climate Coalition, lobbying against attempts to reduce carbon monoxide emissions.

President, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which has lobbied against the Department of the Environment’s standards on ozone, lead and sulphur dioxide pollution from cars. Also lobbied against European directives against exhaust gases, removal of lead from petrol, and forcing motor manufacturers to install catalytic converters.

Chairman of the Government’s Cleaner Vehicles Task Force.

Chris Fay

Chairman and Chief Executive of Shell UK, the British company with the most controversial environmental record due to pollution incidents in Britain and in the Niger Delta.

Executive director of BAA Plc, attempting to double size of Heathrow Airport.
President of the UK Offshore Operators Association, oil industry group responsible for lobbying against environmental regulations.

Chairman of the government’s Advisory Committee on Business and the Environment.

Brian Riddleston

Chief executive of Celtic Energy, an open-cast mining corporation which destroyed the Selar Grasslands Site of Special Scientific Interest in Wales, wildflower habitat and home of extremely rare march fritillary butterfly.

Member of the Government’s Countryside Council for Wales.

Graham Hawker

Chief executive of Welsh utilities company Hyder, which sp0ent £42.2m on making people redundant, and only £700,000 on research and development. Opposed windfall tax on privatised utilities.

Chair of the New Deal Taskforce in Wales

Martin Taylor

Chief executive of Barclays Plc. Multimillionaire manager of company which made 21,000 redundant in ten years to 1997.

Lord Haskins

Chairman, Northern Foods Plc. Member of Hampel Committee on Corporate Governance. This was criticised by Margaret Beckett for failing to recommend ways for companies to regulate themselves.

Chair of the government’s Better Regulation Task Force.

Peter Sainsbury

Managing director for Corporate and External Affairs, Marks and Spencer.

Head of Better Regulation Taskforce’s Consumer Affairs Group, whose duties include consumer protection. This decided that voluntary measures and ‘consumer education’ were better than regulation.

Geoffrey Robinson

Director of Central and Sheerwood plc, property owned and chaired by fraudster and pension raider Robert Maxwell. C&S merged with Robinson’s TransTec, to form Transfer Technology Plc. Company later collapsed.

Paymaster General.

Private Eye on the Political Influence of Big Accountancy

In my last post, I criticised the pernicious cross-party influence of the think tanks and lobbying firms. I posted up an article on them from a 2012 issue of Private Eye. That same issue also carried another relevant article, describing the way the big accountancy firms, in this case, PricewaterhouseCoopers were also working for all of the major political parties. They were similarly active promoting their polices of tax avoidance, while avoiding the repercussions for their role in the collapse of banks such as Northern Rock and the development of tax avoidance schemes. The article ran

Anybody wondering why the fallout from recent financial scandals never gets too near the big accountancy firms that are at the heart of so many – the failure to audit collapsing banks properly, the sale of billions’ of pounds’ worth of tax avoidance schemes – will be interested n a few lines from the annual report of PricewaterhouseCoopers (Northern Rock auditor and adviser on Barclays’ tax avoidance schemes, among other lucrative lines).

PwC, it emerges, “provided a total of some 3,454 hours of free technical support to political parties during the year”, valued at £400,000, and made up of “2,622 hours ot the Labour Party and 832 to the Liberal Democrat Party”. In recent years, it reveals, “the trend has been that we have provided more hours to the opposition parties as they have less support infrastructure”.

Small wonder coalition and opposition alike are expanding the opportunities for PwC’s offshore tax schemes (<Eyes passim) and overlooking the obvious need to rein in Britain’s big beancounting operations.

This is exactly correct. Mike over at Vox Political has sharply criticised Rachel Reeves, for example, for accepting the help and advice of the big accountancy firms. This help isn’t free. The cost is the continuing corruption of British politics and the erosion of public confidence in the willingness and ability of their leaders to represent them, not corporate big business.

Lenin on Britain as International Financial Creditor

Lenin: Russian Revolutionary and critic of international capitalism

I’ve already blogged on the harmful way the British financial sector is geared towards external investment, with the result that the vast concentration on developing it since Margaret Thatcher has decimated British manufacturing. British investment in the Developing World, along with the rest of the financial aid offered in the form of loans, has also contributed to the massive debt accrued by these nations and the consequent damage to their economies. I believe that Britain is now one of the world’s major creditors, owed billions by the nations in which she has invested. Private Eye has criticised the way British aid agencies, such as the Centre for Development, have been transformed into commercial funding agencies to allow British banks to invest for profit in various enterprises in Africa and the Developing World. These enterprises are purely commercial, and do not provide any valuable services to the countries in which they are established – such as alleviating mass poverty, developing food or water supplies, providing better and more widespread medical care – other than a dividend for their shareholders and investors.

Great Britain as Global Creditor in 19th Century

This financial exploitation of the Developing World has its roots in British and Western imperialism. Already by the beginning of the 20th century economists and critics of capitalism, such as the leader of the Russian Communists, Lenin, had noticed the change in Britain from an industrial economy to one based on international finance. In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin states

“Great Britain,” says Schulze-Gaevernitz, “is gradually becoming transformed from an industrial into a creditor state. Notwithstanding the absolute increase in industrial output and the export of manufactured goods, there is an increase in the relative importance of income from interest and dividends, issues of securities, commissions and speculation in the whole of the national economy. In my opinion it is precisely this that forms the economic basis of imperialist ascendancy. The creditor is more firmly attached to the debtor than the seller to the buyer.”…

The rentier states is a state of parasitic, decaying capitalism, and this circumstance cannot fail to influence all the socio-political conditions of the countries concerned…

Britain without Industry or Agriculture: Hobson on the Impact of European Conquest and Investment in China

He then cites the Liberal journalist, Hobson, on the destructive effects on the domestic economy caused by dependence on the colonies. Considering the partition of China by the European powers, Hobson predicted that this would lead to the de-industrialisation of Britain and the other European countries. The country would, according to Hobson, be dominated by wealthy aristocrats living off their investments in the Far East, surrounded by the servants and a few tradesmen they supported. But domestic industry would completely vanish as it was overtaken by cheaper competition from the Middle Kingdom.

The quotation from Hobson runs:

The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a larger body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods; all th emain arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and manufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa … We have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of Western states, a European federation of great powers which, so far from forwarding the cause of world civilisation, might introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new financial aristocracy. Let those who would scout such a theory [it would be better to say: prospect] as undeserving of consideration examine the economic and social condition of districts in Southern England today which are already reduced to this condition, and reflect upon the vast extension of such a system which might be rendered feasible by the subjection of China to the economic control of similar groups of financiers, investors, and political and business officials, draining the greatest potential reservoir of profit the world has ever known, in order to consume it in Europe. The situation is far too complex, the paly of world forces far too incalculable, to render this or any other single interpretation of the future very probable; but the influences which govern the imperialism of Western Europe today are moving in this direction, and, unless counteracted or diverted, make towards some such consummation. Hobson, Imperialism, 1902, pp. 1o03, 205, 335, 386, cited in Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Lenin: Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1968) 243.

British Economic Decline Today, and Modern China as Centre for Investment

Clearly, the situation isn’t quite like Hobson predicted. Britain no longer has an empire as such, though she still has an extensive commercial system tying her former colonies to economic dependence. China is now a free nation, that has become an economic superpower in its own right. We also still have some manufacturing industry and agriculture. Nevertheless, it did provide a roughly accurate prediction of the way the British economy has been devastated to become dependent on a financial sector orientated towards overseas investment, including that of China. This can also be clearly seen in the adverts for one of the main British high street banks – I can’t remember whether it’s Lloyd’s, TSB or Barclays. The advert shows various ‘quaint’ customs in China, such as giving presents of money in red envelopes, or fishermen using birds to catch fish, before ending with the headline ‘-: the world’s local bank’.

Now I don’t begrudge the Chinese or anyone else the development of their economies. I would, however, like some of the investment we have directed to the outside world redirected inwards to stimulate and support British agriculture and industry here, rather than simply providing an income to the small part of the British economy consisting of the City of London.

Kropotkin on Globalisation

On Tuesday, Barclays announced that they were shedding 7,000 jobs in Britain. The mobility of capitalism around the world is now a major feature of today’s global economy following the globalisation of capitalism and industry during the 1990s. Critics of international capitalism, such as Lenin in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism noted that this was occurring in their own time, the late 19th and vey early 20th centuries. The German Marxist, Karl Kautsky, also remarked in his writing on the movement of capital from the imperial heartlands to their colonies and what would become the Developing World. The imperialist powers were attempting to develop their possessions and open up markets and sources of labour elsewhere around the world, with the result that the industries in their heartlands would inevitably suffer.

Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread also remarked on it, and denounced the way it led to factory closures, unemployment and starvation in the imperial countries of Britain, France and so on, and exploitation and the use of military force to quell discontent in the European empires’ subject nations.

‘The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.

The working people cannot purchase with their wages the wealth which they have produced, and industry seeks foreign markets among the monied classes of other nations. In the East, in Africa, everywhere, in Egypt, Tonkin or the Congo, the European is thus bound to promote the growth of serfdom. And so he does. But soon he finds that everywhere there are similar competitors. All the nations evolve on the same lines, and wars, perpetual wars, break out for the right of precedence in the market. Wars for the possession of the East, wars for the empire of the sea, wars to impose duties on imports and to dictate conditions to neighbouring states; wars against those ‘blacks’ who revolt! The roar of the cannon never ceases in the world, whole races are massacred, the states of Europe spend a third of their budgets in armaments, and we know how heavily these taxes fall on the workers.’

The British Empire has formally retreated and turned into the Commonwealth, and Cameron has slashed the armed forces and their funding. In other respects, however, the analysis is pretty as true today as it was in Kropotkin’s day. In many cases, however, the massacres are now committing by the various developing nations for their elites to gain control of the sites of raw materials, so these can be sold to global multinationals. Hence the horrific bloodshed, in which over 4 million people have been killed, in Central Africa for control of diamonds and some of the precious metals used in the IT industries, including mobile phones.