What does this prove?

They may be well-paid but that doesn’t mean they aren’t allowed to have an opinion.

1

I’m not sure it’s meant to “prove” anything.

What it does do is demonstrate that the signatories of the letter have very little reason to fear from the cutbacks and potential job losses that many of their employees and society as a whole will be concerned about.

As others have noted in other threads on LC and elsewhere, being successful in business does not make you uniquely insightful about the business of government.

It’s all very well to bray about how the private sector can replace the jobs lost in the public sector, but we all know the jobs they are talking aout will be less well paid, with less protection and poorer conditions.

Triumphalist fat cats got us into this mess, ably assisted by their dupes in government and the media; it’s hardly likely they would recommend higher taxes and a more equitable and fairer mix of cuts vs. taxes is it?

What does Nigel Stanley earn a year?

@ 2: So, no freedom of expression for the rich then?

Isn’t this just “Kill the poor!” inverted? Very progressive!

@3: Good question!

3

Why does it matter? He wasn’t a signatory to the letter.

right wingers are usually associated with free market economics

free market economics is usually associated with a conception of individuals as rational and self interested.

right wingers are usually associated with the idea that public figures like politicians are self-interested and tend to say one thing whilst meaning another

right wingers usually interpret that actions of trade unions leaders as being about maximizing the their own and their members interests at the expense of the general public

the signatories of this letter evidently have much more to fear from tax increases than they do from cuts to public services used by poor people.

any right winger should be looking at this letter and seeing people promoting their own self-interest. It’s as simple as that.

What it proves is that we not all in this together and that the cuts hit the poorest the hardest.

4 tbm

Errrmmmm…no. Perhaps you should take the trouble to read what I actually posted rather than spout knee-jerk responses on the basis of what your ideological pre-conceptions told you I must mean.

I said nothing about denying them freedom of expression, or killing the rich. I said their letter needed to be taken with a bucket load of salt and amounted to special pleading; that’s hardly the same as calling for their heads to be mounted on pikes on London Bridge.

I have to say these guys had better not be laying people off anytime soon!!

9

Why should we assume they would have any sense of shame even if they did?

It is vanishingly unlikely that the kind of people who signed such a letter and posted it in the Telegraph, and those who agree with them, don’t agree with the sentiments expressed in Luis’ post @ 6 above.

Companies have no morals. If it suits them to make people redundant, they will be able to justify it to themselves and their shareholders. Even if they have the grace to lose some sleep over doing it, they can at least take some solace that they are not in fact in the same boat as those not earning telephone figure salaries.

Galen10, I’m inclined to agree with Luis @6, btw. I just think the OP and similar ‘arguments’ are a bit childish. Luis makes the point in a much better way (as usual). Of course, non-right-wingers have their own interests, too.

BTW, Luis, I finally got around to reading the Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy – very interesting so far. Thanks for recommending it.

oh great – v glad you like it.

11

I also agree with Luis. I don’t know that the OP and similar comments are necessarily “childish”; it’s quite legitimate in my view to point out that those making the point in the letter to the Telegraph do so from a position of financial comfort and safety beyond the dreams of most oridinary folk.

It is these oridinary folk who will of course bear the brunt of the ideologically based cuts in services, as well as being at risk of losing their jobs, benefits, or at least at risk of having to pay considerably more for things like university education.

Obviously we all have our own axes to grind, but we shouldn’t let the Torygraph 35 away with trying to convince us (or indeed themselves) that what they are supporting is part of the Coalition’s “fairness”.

This article seems to miss the point. It is not that they don’t oppose the cuts, as if it might affect them personally. It is that they say that the strategy adopted by the coalition is the right one for the economic well-being of the country.

As successful business people their aim, in this context, is to continue the economic recovery of the country (and therefore their businesses), which exposes the labour position. I note that there hasn’t been a collection of successful business people responding in kind to support the labour position.

@ 14 Ian.

Have a look at the Independent today.

Ian,

OK, there may be some overlap between the interests of these people and the companies they run, and the interests of the British people and the economy that sustains them. Some.

I will reprint what I saids on the other post about this….

This is why a bunch of corporate whores (sorry the Supreme Court ) in the USA have recently turned over a 100 year precedent that stopped allowing corporations to donate to political parties anonymously. From now on corporations will be allowed to donate as much money as they like and will not have to say who they are. It is another example of the increasing special rules that corporations are taking for themselves against the individual.

Remember that the next time you hear the Right whining about Trade Unions. The Republican party is out spending the Democratic party by a margin of 9-1 thanks to all this corporate money. And not only that, the corporations can run negative attack adds without having to say who is behind them. Who needs communism when you can have corporate communism?

8 Galen 10 (are you Nigel Stanley?)

You think I “should take the trouble to read what I actually posted rather than spout knee-jerk responses on the basis of what your ideological pre-conceptions told you I must mean”.

Your article is a list of names together with their job titles and (large) salaries – nothing else – and you have the effrontery to talk about ideological pre-conceptions.

Maybe some or all of the signatories – rich as they are – are not motivated by self-interest but actually believe in the cuts. Your world-view doesn’t appear to allow that possibility.

18 tbm

LOL… why would the first and most logical thing that sprang into your mind be that I was the OP?

I’m not him..no idea about who he is or his motivations…I don’t much care to be honest.

My world view (which unlike yours doesn’t jump to assume someone who posts in a thread must be the OP doing it pseudonomously) is quite capable of accepting that the 35 signatories do in fact agree with the cuts. It’s also capable of seeing that in many cases the two things might (shock horror) be true at the same time; they are true believers and self interested.

No shit sherlock.

Their letter is a tory stunt end off.

N

Galen10,

I also agree with Luis. I don’t know that the OP and similar comments are necessarily “childish”; it’s quite legitimate in my view to point out that those making the point in the letter to the Telegraph do so from a position of financial comfort and safety beyond the dreams of most oridinary folk.

The message is that we cannot / must not trust the opinion of those people because they are rich and/or in a particular position; the merits or otherwise of their argument can be instantly dismissed because they earn a particular amount of money a year (what is the threshold). The value of their opinion is inversely proportional to their earnings, unless they agree with me of course. Great, I’ll take it on board.

21 ukliberty

Why must you always be so precious!?

We are within our rights to question their motives not because we are simplistic enough to equate every rich person with holding the same opinions as the 35. I’m sure there are some people in their earnings range who would agree with my views, tho probably fewer than would take the opposite view.

Since they have seen fit to append their names to the letter published in the Torygraph however, it is hardly unreasonable to question their motivations and take due cognizance of their personal economic circumstances.

I didn’t say their opinion was valueless, I said it might be self interested as well as sincerely held.

You appear more interested (as seems often to be the case in your posts) with scoring intellectual points from some soi distant, rarified plane than actually addressing the issues.

If, as these business “leaders” maintain, the private sector is more than capable of augmenting the job losses resulting from the cutbacks, then why have they done precious little to date? It seems to me that they have had much more to do with wages suppression, winding down of final salary pensions and offshoring assets than job creation in the UK. However I will concede that they have played no small hand in migrating UK based jobs to “geographicall advantagous” regions.

I wok in the public sector, I’ll have my say, may family and friends will be boycotting the companies that support job cuts in the public sector and will try to spread the word

23

Because it’s a “virtuous circle”; they can do good in the sense of their shareholders and company (and therefore themselves) by improving the bottom line of their companies and simultaneously help create an environment which is “business friendly”, which will reflect the personal politcal agendas of many (tho’ not all ukliberty, alright…?) people in their situation.

Businesses of course have no morals, which is only to be expected. The people who run them ought to have them tho…. however vestigial.

@19 Galen10,

It was your smug defensiveness that made me think you might be the author.

No shit, Watson.

26

It was hardly smug defensiveness to point out that your orignal post put words in my mouth.

Playing the man rather than the ball is a sure indication that you lack the skill, or the intellect, to do anything else.

Playing the man rather than the ball is a sure indication that you lack the skill, or the intellect, to do anything else.

Slightly ironic to see this comment on a piece that entirely ignores the contents of a letter, concentrating instead on the salaries of the signatories. Don’t disagree, however.

Galen10,

Since they have seen fit to append their names to the letter published in the Torygraph however, it is hardly unreasonable to question their motivations and take due cognizance of their personal economic circumstances.

I didn’t say it wasn’t. Nigel Stanley wrote, “I don’t think [these rich people] are going to be hurt very much by the cuts. Tax would perhaps be another thing”. That’s it.

But there are at least six claims in their letter that we could argue with. I’m just looking for a bit more thought about the letter than so-and-so earns lots of money.

It seems to me the first sentence of scandalousbill’s comment@23 makes for a more interesting springboard for discussion, for example.

I don’t understand your problem here, given your complaint about “playing the man rather than the ball”.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

28

Well, no.. it WOULD be ironic if the posts were off topic, and the OP had been about the content of the letter, but it wasn’t.

tbm then tried to say it was about denying freedom of expression to the rich, and that it amounted to the inverse of “kill the poor”, which was just ridiculous.

29

It’s really not rocket science. The OP isn’t about the content of the letter, indeed I believe there is another thread devoted to it – it’s a piece filling in some of the back story, and none the worse for that.

I don’t have any problem with it.

Quite apart from what these men earn, their claim that private sector jobs will replace the lost 600,000 public sector jobs is risible. It also belies the record of job cuts in recent years in their companies.

I’ve got the exact figures over at my blog e.g. BT have slashed 35,000 jobs in recent years http://www.osamasaeed.org/osama/2010/10/mind-your-own-business.html