Factories chief: Labour would go back to 1970s
THE head of Britain’s manufacturing trade body and a leading critic of Theresa May’s Brexit strategy has said he still backs the Tories despite misgivings over their manifesto.
Terry Scuoler, the chief executive of manufacturers’ group the EEF, said concerns about Brexit were outweighed by his members’ fears over Labour’s ‘socialist’ policies.
‘I and our member companies cannot support a Labour party agenda for business or indeed for this country,’ he said. ‘And on balance I and my member companies would support a Conservative-led Government.’
Scuoler said he thinks Labour’s manifesto has ‘sensible individual measures’, but he has doubts about the party’s overall approach.
‘Some of the policies that we have seen and discussed with the Shadow Cabinet really are socialist,’ he said. ‘They really smack of a bygone era, of taking us back to the 1970s and 80s. They are policies which I think had been proven to limit productivity, hold Britain back and damage wealth creation.’
The interventionism was ‘not in keeping with the 21st Century’, he added.
The EEF represents 20,000 companies which between them employ more than a million staff. Board members include bosses from Tata Steel, Siemens and Jaguar Land Rover.
The organisation has previously been openly critical of May’s insistence that no deal with the EU would be better than a bad deal.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday this weekend, he said he was not happy with the Tory commitment to reduce net immigration – ‘which for us is imported labour’ – to tens of thousands.
In addition, he said he was not pleased about the proposal to double the £1,000 levy that companies currently pay on each foreign worker they employ.