A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 16th May 2003.
Lord Simon of Highbury’s advocacy of Britain abolishing the pound on the grounds that it will assist inward investment in competition with euroland (report, May 14th) sits oddly with the record of his own term as chairman of BP when the vast bulk of its investment went into North America and the Far East, especially China, as it continues to do.
Likewise, claims by Sir Nick Scheele of Ford and others (Business, May 13th) that abolishing the pound will introduce vitally needed “stability” hardly squares with his company’s sourcing its engines for European markets from its factories in Brazil, a country whose currency has changed its value against the dollar by about 70 per cent in seven years and changed its name three times in the past 10.
Rick Waggoner, chairman of General Motors, who has just announced £80 million of actual, not theoretical investment, for Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant, is surely right when he commented that the real issue is not the pound/euro exchange rate, but labour competitiveness.
This was borne out last week when a local engineering factory closed with the loss of 270 jobs, basically due to the fact that the competitive Chinese factory pays £15 a week compared with £330 a week here – a difference of 22 times.
This massive difference is engaging the attention of just about every manufacturing company in the land. Compared with this, the few per cent variations in the pound/euro exchange rate are a total irrelevance.
Paper based on a speech given to the North of England Plastic Processors’ Consortium on 31st October 1997, to explain the importance of engineering and manufacture to the economy.
S F Bush
To read the text please click on The Engineer as Decision Maker which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.
A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 9th May 1997.
The announcement that a dedicated proponent of abolishing the pound sterling, Sir David Simon, is to be succeeded in his job as chairman of British Petroleum by Peter Sutherland – an Irishman, previously an EU commissioner (City Comment, May 8), brings into question the extent to which certain corporate businessmen are using their business positions to advance personal political objectives.
In the absence of any convincing economic or business arguments in favour of abolishing the pound, but with many against, nobody can seriously deny that the issue is overwhelmingly a political one – namely our continued existence as a self-governing country.
That being so the Confederation of British Industry – headed by another Irish citizen Niall Fitzgerald also chairman of Unilever, a predominantly British company – might wish to consider whether it and its member companies wish to be identified with a political viewpoint which, as shown in poll after poll, is overwhelmingly opposed by the British people.
That the Republic of Ireland is a supporter of this viewpoint is understandable, given the continued prominence in our affairs of certain of its citizens and the fact that Ireland receives around £2,000 per annum per family from the EU, about £400 of which comes from British families. However these are not reasons, one would have thought, which grass roots members of the CBI support.
