We are all watching in horror, say British firms
UK’S top business entities fear companies reaching ‘point of no return’
LONDON: As the Theresa May government prepares for emergency measures to deal with a no-deal Brexit, five leading UK business organisations on Wednesday said companies are “watching in horror” at factional politics in Westminster that are preventing progress.
Urging politicians to prevent a disorderly “no-deal” Brexit on March 29, 2019, the heads of the five organisations said companies are reaching “the point of no return”, affecting their expansion and forcing them to focus on contingency plans.
“Businesses have been watching in horror as politicians have focused on factional disputes rather than practical steps that business needs to move forward. The lack of progress in Westminster means that the risk of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit is rising,” they said in a statement.
The five organisations representing hundreds of thousands of companies in the UK are British Chambers of Commerce, Confederation of British Industry, EEF (the manufacturers’ organisation), Federation of Small Businesses, and the Institute of Directors.
“Businesses of all sizes are reaching the point of no return, with many now putting in place contingency plans that are a significant drain of time and money. Firms are pausing or diverting investment that should be boosting productivity, innovation, jobs and pay into stockpiling goods or materials, diverting cross-border trade and moving offices, factories and therefore jobs and tax revenues out of the UK,” they added.
They further said: “While many companies are actively preparing for a ‘no deal’ scenario, there are also hundreds of thousands who have yet to start – and cannot be expected to be ready in such a short space of time.”
INDIANS, EU CITIZENS TO BE TREATED ON PAR
Post Brexit, citizens from 27 EU countries and those from India and elsewhere will be treated on par when it comes to migration, the British government announced on Wednesday in what is billed as the visa system’s “biggest shake-up in 40 years”.
A new visa route for skilled migrants and scrapping of the annual 20,700-limit for work permits are among proposals outlined in a white paper announced by home secretary Sajid Javid. They will come into force in 2021, if the Brexit process is completed.
The proposals are likely to benefit Indian professionals, who in the year ending September 2018, were granted 55 percent of all Tier 2 or skilled visas. EU professionals and low-skilled workers will no longer have the automatic right to move and work in the UK after Brexit.
Javid said, “Immigration is good for our country. It has made us stronger in countless ways. I am a second-generation migrant myself.” WASHINGTON:YOU are the product. That is the deal many Silicon Valley companies offer to consumers. The users get free search engines, social media accounts and smartphone apps, and the companies use the personal data they collect — your searches, “likes,” phone numbers and friends — to target and sell advertising. There are several takeaways from our investigation.
On Tuesday, the attorney general in the nation’s capital filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allowing data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly access data from 87 million users.
We don’t sell data to anyone,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, had told Congress during a hearing in April. His pledge — the torrent of data Facebook collects from its 2.2 billion users will always remain safely in Facebook’s hands.
The probe reveals Facebook continued to give huge tech companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, access to much more.
Internal documents obtained by The Times show that Facebook shared data with more than 150 companies. The data partnerships date to 2010, at the start of a period of headlong growth and expansion for Facebook. Within a few years, the social network had struck so many of these deals that Facebook employees built a tool to track the different types of access the partners had.
Facebook appears not to have kept close tabs on how its users’ data flowed out into the world.