UK | Disgrace of unemployment becoming a nice little earner | Herald Scotland

DAVID Cameron is sick, he says, of “anti-business snobbery”.

Speaking in London the other day, the Prime Minister denounced the “dangerous rhetoric” which holds that wealth creation, as he understands it, “is somehow anti-social, that people in business are out for themselves”.

It’s not clear who is supposed to have said these things, but on one interpretation Mr Cameron has a point. It would be patently unfair to link honest manufacturers struggling to do their best by their customers and their workers with the excesses of investment banking, or with FTSE executives hauling home 40% pay rises. The Prime Minister forgot to make that distinction.

“We have got to fight this mood with all we’ve got,” he said of the new snobbery. “Not just because it’s wrong for our economy because we need the jobs and investment it brings, but because it’s wrong for our society. Business is not just about making money, as vital as that is. It’s also the most powerful force for social progress the world has ever known.”

That puts organised religion, education, trade unionism, the universal franchise, and every social reformer you could name in perspective. Never mind. Forget, too, that Mr Cameron has changed his tune since those lectures on “moral capitalism”. Reports that he had interesting exchanges with business leaders (and Tory Party donors) at the Davos summit are clearly irrelevant.

He’s sickened. Nausea has been induced by the claim that people in business could be out for themselves. How is the prime ministerial constitution coping, then, with the tale of Emma Harrison and her welfare-to-work company, A4e? …

via Disgrace of unemployment becoming a nice little earner | Herald Scotland.