Labour and business: the end of the affair

Establishment figures often talk in a strange code when they criticise each other. Among the great and the good, it’s not the done thing to name-call, y’see.
But CBI Director General Richard Lambert was unusually blunt when he spoke about Gordon Brown in Nottingham on Thursday.
He accused the man who is now Prime Minister of being “profligate” when he was Chancellor – in other words, of spraying money around in an irresponsible manner.
Why should we pay attention to the boss of a business pressure group? Businesses moan about Government all the time, don’t they?
They do, but Lambert’s moan at the East Midlands Conference Centre (if moan it was) comes from a hugely experienced and particularly well-informed man.
This is the chap who was editor of the Financial Times, the pink paper the wealthy read, and has also done a stint on the Monetary Policy Committee – the Bank of England body that decides how much you and me will pay for borrowing by setting interest rates.
So he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the economy.
And accusing a Chancellor of being profligate – a Chancellor, remember, who liked to claim he was prudent, and played safe with the economy – is pretty wounding stuff.
Lambert’s point is that the Government should have shovelled a load of money into the UK’s piggybank when the going was good so that it could ride to the financial rescue in a downturn. It can’t, because – just like the rest of us - it went on a spending spree with borrowed money.
This isn’t a new criticism. But the fact that the head honcho at the biggest and most influential business organisation in Britain has stood up in Nottingham and said it publicly is significant.
Why? Go back a couple of years and some CBI members used to grumble that their leaders were too cosy with the Government. Similarly, Tony Blair liked to brag his party of the people was now best mates with business.
Well, if there ever was a love affair between the two, it’s over now. Too much red tape and too many surprise Budget announcements affecting business have seen to that.
Lambert made one more interesting observation when he spoke the other night: though Gordon Brown might have cause to be gloomy about the economy, business itself could afford to stay positive.
What about all the doom-and-gloom headlines we get battered with everyday? Well that’s all they are, according to Lambert – headlines, written in London by London-based financial journalists who spend their days binge-drinking on gloom with financial analysts who spend their days binge-drinking on gloom with the bankers who started it all off.
These are challenging times, for sure, but Lambert’s message is this: unless you’re a Prime Minister or a London gloomaholic, it’s business as usual.