to think 100 business leaders have more credibility

[longfingernails]

than Ed Miliband?

Cue the usual left-wing demonisation of business, accusations of fat cattery, and the denigration of success. Labour can't escape the perception, firmly rooted in fact, that they are now an anti-business party, and therefore an anti-jobs party.

More Tory donors than women on that list

It looks like at least one of these signatories is still in jail for insider trading. I wonder how he managed to add his signature?

Brilliant !

Once business leaders let little boys die in the mines and cut their legs and arms off on the mill floor. Today they avoid tax, sleep with George Osborne and write letters. That's progress, I suppose.

'Jobs = zero hours contracts

Business leaders = rich, self-interested tax avoiders'

This exactly.

For "business leaders" read "feudal overlords". If the present govt is re-elected we'll continue on our path of going back to the middle ages with the peasants getting poorer and poorer under the cosh and the rich getting richer and richer while doing what they bloody well please and without any accountability. On the other hand I don't think Ed has what it takes to run the country and he sounds like Pitt the Younger in Blackadder
It's the devil or the deep blue sea. At least the SNP seem to actually have the best interests of their country at heart.

Zero hours contracts, umbella companies that put the onus on paying employer tax and NI on the employee - plus no employee rights, sick pay, holiday pay, agencies that end the job at 11 weeks and 5 days so the employee never qualifies for sick pay or holiday pay and that hire only 'apprentices' so they don't have to pay min. wage. This is the reality of job creation under Tory government.

I am sorry, but I am just not listening to Labour's bollocks pretense that it will sort out the issue of zero hours contracts.

It was under the Blair government that this precarity phenomenon took off in the first place. They brought in legislation that gave temp workers permanent rights if they worked for one employer for over 365 days, which then meant that employers then responded by making temp contracts only 360 days long. When said contracts finished, the employers would tell the worker to reapply for the role in two weeks time and, when they did, another 360 day contract would be issued.

Employees on these contracts found themselves not only without permanent rights but being forced to be unemployed for two weeks every year in order to retain their jobs.

The ultimate joke about this was that these tactics were used by government departments and quangos under the damn Labour government itself. It was going on all over Whitehall. They were also using recruitment agencies to distance themselves from any potential fallout of these practices, and a lot of these agency workers were on time cards -- so no sick leave, no annual leave.

The thing about the Tories is that if they want to screw you, they will slap you in the face. Labour, on the other hand, smiles sweetly at you so they you don't notice when their mate pick-pockets your purse.

Here's an alternative view on how people see the current government in relation to business and the economy:

David Cameron has presided over an economy with the weakest productivity record of any government since the second world war, the Office for National Statistics said as it revealed output per worker fell again in the final three months of 2014.

In a separate blow to the government, two-thirds of leading UK economists said they believed George Osbornes austerity strategy had been bad for the economy.

From www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/01/uk-productivity-growth-is-weakest-since-wwii-says-ons

99 LOL back at you that I sound like the UKIP people! I don't really go for their way of thinking, although the one fair thing Farage has said is that he said the attacks on Miliband had been too extreme. It's not just me - there are many people out there thinking he is being personally attacked in a way that shouldn't happen and is not relevant to the debate. There would be plenty of instances for Cameron to set against those you mention for Miliband - leaving his child in the pub, for one example - and I do't see Labour talking incessantly about that.

I think it's likely to be one of the other Richard Josephs.... (It's probably not the one that died in 2007 either.)

My job is to understand how policies change the behaviour of the people to whom they are applied. I cut my teeth on tax policy but now I advise more widely. I occasionally work with businesses; I work far more often with governments. When I do this work I strive very hard to be non-political in my thinking. As an individual, I vote Labour.

In my experience, the majority of businesses do think beyond mere profit. Most (not all) want to give something back - by supporting charities, by taking on apprentices, by sponsoring schools or young offender programmes or youth unemployment. The vast, vast majority are law-abiding and would be aghast at any suggestion to them that they should exploit loopholes (whether tax, or environmental, or employment, or H&S) to save money. In my experience, large businesses are more likely to be law-abiding that small businesses.

Don't get me wrong - they are there to make money for their shareholders too, and their management. But they understand that it's better to make £90 legitimately than £100 by crossing the line. Not just because of the risk to their reputation but also because it's the right thing to do.

You can argue, and I do, that it would be even better if they made £80 and shared the wealth with their employees. But it's not quite as straightforward as that because much of the wealth paid to shareholders goes to pension funds and so paying £10 more to employees might take £7 away from pensioners now or in the future. Which might be the better thing to do, but it's not always obvious whether it is or not.

The reality is that most businesses and their leaders aren't greedy fat cats any more than benefits claimants are greedy scroungers.

(Don't get me started on private equity though - they're the pits.)

Worksallhours - are you accusing labour of doing that deliberately or of poorly draughted legislation? It seems to me the employers are not obliged to use a loophole to evade their responsibilities.

Wow huge shock: Daily Telegraph puts out pro Tory propaganda from business leaders in a "personal" capacity who are probably party doners.

Just had radio on.
I find it oddly hypocritical that labour have said they wish to get rid of zero hour contracts but apparently labour themselves have several employees themselves in zero hour contracts.

How can you truly be against them if you choose to implement them yourself?

I'm not saying the conservatives argument today is right either just that I heard today's discussion on the radio and found this somewhat conflicting.

I don't know who to vote for at the moment.

It's hardly surprising that business leaders come out to support the conservatives.

It's like the Pope saying he supports the Catholic Church.

IIRC, that was well intentioned but poorly drafted legislation. It's very straightforward to write legislation that treats two back-to-back contracts as one continuous one.

But there are other features of today's employment market which were driven by the workers. Umbrella companies, for example, were pretty much invented by the IT sector where staff wanted to work flexibly and also pay less income tax and NI as self-employed contractors than employees (and pay it later in the year). It was worth it for them to take on the burden of paying tax and NI.

Zero hour contracts are tricky. They're not necessarily a wholly terrible thing if what you want as a worker is flexibility.

They are a terrible thing if what you want is certainty and you haven't got a more secure alternative.

FWIW, this government passed legislation last month making it illegal for zero hour contracts to also include an exclusivity clause preventing the employee also taking on work elsewhere.

Regardless of what business leaders have written, I do not trust labour with our security nor our economy.

CinnabarRed, as a Labour voter who also works with Big Business, how much confidence do you have in Labour's ability to manage the economy?

It's a genuine question. I'm completely undecided where is best to cast my vote and desperate to read or hear informed and unbiased opinion in all this GE campaigning but at this rate I fear I shall end up flipping a coin on election day.

margarita ... Neither. It seemed to me at the time that the legislation was little more than a PR job and sop to the unions, but that, when it came to the crunch, Labour-run government departments and quangos had no problem whatsoever with utilising loopholes to avoid it in a manner that distinctly went against the spirit of the legislation.

I remember being flabbergasted when a friend of mine told me he was in that contractual situation while working for the ODPM, which was Prescott's office at the time. The audacity of it just staggered me.

The reality is that the economy is recovering, but slowly, and no matter who you vote for there is pain still to come.

If you think that the most important thing is eradicating the deficit as quickly as possible then you should vote Conservative. There are some valid arguments to say this is the most sensible thing to do - the UK pays £1bn per week on debt interest, which is more than we pay for education. The nation owes £1.6 trillion to our bond holders.

BUT: paying down the deficit is horribly painful. 80% of it will be paid for through reduced public spending (20% through tax rises). No matter who you chose to vote for (based on announcements to date), there are greater spending cuts to come than we have had over the last 5 years. If you talk to local government and national department heads (which I do, from time to time) they acknowledge that many (by no means all) of the cuts to date have been easier to implement than they expected - there was a lot of fat in the system and many (by no means all) service users haven't experienced a drop in the level of services. But they really struggle to see where future cuts will come from.

Very basically, Labour want fewer spending cuts than the Conservatives, which means it would take longer to pay down the deficit.

I, personally, prefer less pain and keeping the debt for longer. But I respect the position of those who take the other view. I don't know anyone who takes that contrary view lightly, or doesn't care about the implications for the people who use public services.

(As an aside, the size of the deficit is why 80% of pay-down has to come from savings cuts. It's simply impossible to take enough in tax to pay it down. Income tax collects around £150bn per year, and 30% is paid by the top 150,000 (1%) earners - and rightly so, but note that they 'only' earn 13% of income so it's a very progressive tax - so we simply can't collect that much more from them. Corporation tax is around £50bn per year, so even doubling the rate would be a drop in the ocean compared to the deficit - and wouldn't in any case double the amount of tax collected.)

100 business leaders sign up for massive corporate tax breaks…

Other Shocking news:-

Turkeys vote to cancel Christmas
Footballers Demand more money
Easter bunnies demand double time over Easter period

Come on now – this happens every election, Labour will no doubt do the same.

Thank you CinnabarRed, that is the most balanced thing I've read since campaigning started.

Now. When will we be told where the spending cuts would be applied, by either party? After the election?

All of the parties have said that they will continue to protect Health, Education and Overseas Development Aid, which means that other the non-ringfenced departments will be cut by as much as 20% over the coming parliament.

There aren't that many areas where there are tens or hundreds of billions being spent. The state has become increasingly focused on the provision of health and social security, which together accounted for nearly half of all public spending in 2013/14. There has been a long running trend of increasing health spending (7% of total public spending in 1953/54 to 18% of total spending in 2013/14. But Health is protected. Social security has also steadily been accounting for an increasing proportion of spending over time: spending on the state pension and other social security accounted for 5% and 7% (respectively) of total spending in 1953/54, but 12% and 18% (respectively) of total spending in 2013/14. So I think it's inevitable that benefits will be cut further under any scenario.

So where might benefits cuts come from? As a factual point, pensioners have also been largely protected from the cuts, particularly when compared to working-aged benefits claimants. We might see universal pensioner benefits means-tested - but doing so would save a few hundreds of millions, not billions.

The manifestos might include more details, but they're not expected until after Easter (not too long now, in fact). In reality, the coalition will inevitably have a better idea of where future spending cuts could come from than the opposition.

I also commend this analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies:

www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/gb/gb2015/ch9_gb2015.pdf

It points out that total social security spending is forecast to be £220 billion in 2015/16, around 30% of total government expenditure. I quote directly below.

Pensioners are expected to receive 55% of social security spending in 2015/16. This proportion has been growing as a result of increased numbers of pensioners, greater state pension entitlements among those who recently reached the state pension age, and the fact that pensioners have so far been largely protected from the cuts to social security. Continuing to protect pensioners would require much larger cuts to working-age social security for a given reduction in public spending.

The Conservatives have said that they would seek to make further cuts of £12 billion to annual social security spending were they to form the next government. To give an idea of scale, freezing all benefits and tax credits other than state pensions for five years would cut spending by £13 billion, taking an average of £800 a year from 16 million families. To cut spending on this scale while protecting pensioners entirely would require more severe cuts to working-age benefits; even continuing the Conservatives’ proposed freeze of most working-age benefits for five years would only reduce spending by £6.9 billion.

Other options that could save substantial sums include making all tenants pay at least 10% of their rent (£2.5 billion), abolishing child benefit and increasing universal credit to compensate low-income families (£4.8 billion), reducing the generosity of means-tested support for children to its 2003/04 level (£5.1 billion) and restricting benefits for families with children to the first two children (which would save around £4 billion a year in the long run).

Many of the policies suggested by the Conservative and Labour parties - withdrawing winter fuel payments from higher- and additional-rate taxpayers, cutting housing benefit for young people, reducing the benefit cap, and increasing child benefit by 1% for a further year --- would reduce spending by relatively little.

The social security system not only gives support to vulnerable groups but also affects incentives around how much paid work to do, where to live and with whom, and even the number of children to have. Giving exemptions from cuts for groups deemed more vulnerable can weaken work incentives and strengthen incentives for people to have children or claim disability benefits. When considering possible changes to the social security system in the coming years, policymakers should bear these trade-offs in mind, have a clear vision for what they want the social security system to achieve and ensure that the overall system of support is coherent.

Err, where do people think all the money comes from that goes into the uk tax coffers... To pay for all the benefits and services we use..