The Beecroft saga is the gift that keeps on giving. Since it was first submitted in October, the report by the venture capitalist and Tory donor Adrian Beecroft has been causing a coalition headache. Earlier this week, Vince Cable said he would not allow the “bonkers” proposals – which include no fault dismissal – to go through.
This was swiftly followed by Nick Clegg rejecting the plans, and reports that Downing Street would quietly drop the report.
But you don’t knock a venture capitalist down that easily, and Beecroft has come out fighting. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, he said that Cable’s objections to the proposals are “ideological not economic”, saying:
I think he is a socialist who found a home in the Lib Dems, so he’s one of the left. I think people find it very odd that he’s in charge of business and yet appears to do very little to support business.
Clearly, Beecroft doesn’t remember Cable’s 2010 conference speech, where he pre-empted precisely these sorts of devastating charges: “I’m not some kind of socialist”. They don’t call him the sage of Twickenham for nothing.
Nor is Cable the only target of Beecroft’s rage – he doesn’t think much of coalition at all, it seems:
I do think they [the Tories] are hugely held back by the Lib Dems. I think you could put together a bunch of suggestions out of the report, as a coherent programme, that would say, you know, we are tackling the issues that business has with employment law but the Lib Dems will have none of it.
Nick Clegg is always threatening to go nuclear and dissolve the whole thing if he doesn’t get his way with this, that and the other. Which you’d think actually must be a hollow threat. Therefore, why can’t the government be more robust? I don’t know what the answer is. But it is disappointing.
He also discloses that although Cameron is now distancing himself from the report, the Conservatives were very supportive of his plans in private meetings: “I’m talking about Steve Hilton, that group and they assured me that David Cameron wanted to do the whole thing”. To paraphrase Scooby Doo, it appears that he thinks he would have got away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky Lib Dems.
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