In his leader’s speech last week, Ed Miliband talked about ‘changing the values of our economy.’ Some businesses have good values, he claimed, and others do not: we need to distinguish in our policy, in our regulation, between ‘producers‘ and ‘predators‘. Right-wing commentators have lambasted these comments from a predictable stand-point. David Osler also suggested here that the distinction was not as clear as he made out – indeed “from the point of view of the working class, predation with a human face is still predation.” Chris Dillow proposes an elegant explanation of why it is no accident that business tends to be predatory: Continue reading
Tagged with Competition
Miliband man versus Tesco monster
Britain is a sleepy nation until a riot wakes it up. The hated poll tax trundled on until mass riots triggered its demise, taking Thatcher with it. Tax dodging on a colossal scale continued unimpeded until UK Uncut shut down Vodaphone and Top Shop in Oxford Street and made Philip Green’s £2bn tax-free dividend to his wife in Monaco a national scandal. Now a riot last weekend in Bristol against a planned Tesco score has put the overweening dominance of Tesco under the searchlight. Do we let Tesco (and other superstores) maraud the retail markets of Britain without check? If not, how do we hold them to account? Continue reading