North East Business Week 2011 Scotland Federation of Small Businesses Political Influencing Event Aberdeen part 2

North East Business Week 2011 Scotland Federation of Small Businesses Political Influencing Event Aberdeen part 2

Banking

There was a general agreement among all the businesses present that banking charges were way too high and we wanted more from our Governments to support us. Unfortunately, Conservative Sandy Wallace and Labour’s Lewis Macdonald immediately threw hands in the air and claimed they had no influence over the banks. Mr Wallace was even quite rude in suggesting we were whingeing and that we were going down the road to left wing trade unionism to even suggest such a thing.

I am glad to say the SNP candidate Kevin Stewart was a great deal less deferential to the banks and brought into play the idea of giving more support to other institutions that could help financially. We all felt very annoyed that people could take out private loans with little security, yet businesses with good records whose application could be supported by groups like the FSB were refused out of hand by managers in distant cities.

Procurement law

This was all new to me but it seems that this law can produce ridiculous outcomes such as a trader from Southampton coming to Aberdeen to carry out one routine electrical task and then going home again. Astute as ever, Sandy got everyone’s back up by saying that regular PAT testing was unnecessary. He wanted to ignore the question and go back to stripping away unnecessary legislation. A laudable idea but the debate has moved on, Sandy, and nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of do-it yourself wiring in our care homes.

Sorry Lewis, I had no idea what you were speaking about. If you or my fellow business people can enlighten me, I will gladly give you a paragraph to put your case.

Kevin spoke the truest words, “Buy cheap, buy dear”, which we readily understood. Local people with skills are being by-passed to bring in big business with no qualms about cutting costs regardless of quality. The savings are probably negligible but the costs to the environment and small local businesses are huge.

Big Corporations

It was my turn at last. I was almost shunted into a siding about financing my business but I got back on track and asked the three politicians what they would be doing to rein in the power of big Corporations. I said this country is a corpocracy not a democracy when 2 million people on the streets can be ignored. My question was about the pollution of the environment by the big retail outlets. Kevin and Andy of the FSB were enthusiastic about encouraging recycling and supporting small businesses in the ‘green’ market. While applauding those initiatives, my challenge is that all that is a drop in the ocean compared to the negative impact caused by selling goods, like disposable nappies, with very bad environmental consequences that the rest of us have to live with and pay for.

Tory Sandy, he is always good for a laugh, isn’t he? He pipes up that the environmental people whinge away but still head for the supermarket and spend £115 every Saturday with the rest of us.

Actually that is my point. Education and offering alternatives at a higher cost is not the answer. Busy people, people with a low income, and people highly influenced by state of the art advertising will go out to buy these damaging products. But the costs need to be born by those who manufacture the goods and following that, by the retailers who sell the goods. Then price rises will be passed on to customers who will be forced to pay the real cost of the product. I don’t think it would take long for retailers large and small to offer alternatives.

All three politicians let me down here. Not one would be willing to challenge the Big Corporations in this. Sandy says it’s a free market economy, Kevin says there is nothing they can do and Lewis concurred. The best I could get was that the SNP would look into discouraging hospitals from taking free disposable nappies in for newborns.

I didn’t add this but say that heroin was legal. Let’s imagine that the big Corps are advertising and selling it; the people are buying it in their millions but everything else in the country is going to the dogs. The healthcare price is phenomenal, the care costs for the children and addicts are horrendous and the business economy is severely damaged.

Are these guys really telling me that they have no power to stop the big Corporations in their tracks?

I say that when Big Business is detrimental to the country they are profiting in, it isn’t only possible to stop them, it is mandatory to stop them. That is what we elect a government to do. If the Government, as represented by these three politicians, says it can’t influence these businesses, then we are not living in a democracy. We are living in a corporate run state dictatorship.

North East Business Week 2011 Scotland Federation of Small Businesses Political Influencing Event Aberdeen part 1

Young Employees

I was invited to the Federation of Small Businesses evening discussion with the four candidates vying for the Aberdeen Central seat in the Scottish elections. Due to very unhappy circumstances, the Lib-Dem candidate Sheila Thompson had to leave early so we did not get much feedback about her party’s thoughts for the future. The rest of us got down to some very vigorous debates.

The first questions came from one of the FSB businessmen. It was about the difficulty that bureaucracy puts in the way of businesses wanting to employ and train young people. The problems reported round the table were that the time, effort and cost to small businesses meant that they could not go on doing this in spite of seeing great value in introducing young people to the work environment in some way.

All the politicians agreed that training and being in the workplace was very beneficial. The Con candidate Sandy Wallace blamed past decisions for adding lots of small pieces of legislation that were good in themselves but became an unbearable burden when all added up together. Andy Willox, the Scottish Policy Convener for the FSB, pointed out that this was not a new problem, all past governments were responsible. As a remedy he suggested that the FSB was in a position to critique proposed legislation and feed back its findings to the Government before policies were implemented. He gave the observation that this would often prevent changes being implemented at great cost only to be found completely inadequate and being retracted for further examination.

The SNP candidate, Kevin Stewart, agreed that the weight of bureaucracy was great and went on to suggest more support for any business bringing in its first employee through the whole first year. The Labour candidate, Lewis Macdonald, was eager to change the subject, I thought, and brought us to the inadequacies of the education system. Tory and Labour seemed to agree that too many children expected to go to university and stigma was involved in failing to do so even though graduates could not expect jobs in their fields at the end of their courses.

I didn’t get the chance to speak but now I can.

The failure of our education system starts early on when children who are reading and writing at an early age are considered successful while children who are more technically gifted or athletic suffer greatly. It is scientifically shown to be harmful to expect children to read and write before their brains are fully developed in that area. This may be as late as 7 or 8 years old in some children. It is also well known that there are distinct learning differences amongst us; Kinaesthetic, visual, and audio being the three that we usually implement in various degrees. Schools are being forced to teach the latter two while children in the kinaesthetic bracket are sadly neglected and suffer as a result.

One after another, Governments dictate through their testing procedures that schools teach every child at same rate and in same way. They then blame schools and the teachers if the children fail.

I also disagree that too many children seek to go to university. If they go to learn and grow as human beings, the universities have a huge responsibility that used to lie with the community. What I would suggest, in line with the conversation round the table, is that before university our children are introduced to a wide variety of real work situations where they are shadowing and working for several days. This greatly increases awareness of what is out there, produces enthusiasm where there was none, and fires young minds with a passion to find and fight for their goals.

Although Sheila Thompson of Lib Dems had left, her words lingered on and were not greeted favourably by candidates and business people alike. She had indicated that she felt that the Enterprise and North East Trust were failing us through high costs and would be terminated. I realize she is in a difficult place now but I would happily publish her response. The business people all agreed that ENE and Business Gateway had been an invaluable resource for their businesses and was the one support that came without a price tag.

Continued