Blair hangs mill-stones around the neck of British economy - Campbell

8.00.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 13th Jun 2006

Sir Menzies Campbell at the end of a speech

Today Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Menzies Campbell delivered a keynote speech at the Annual General Meeting of the CBI. Sir Menzies said "Underlying the Government's growing problems is a fundamentally flawed approach to management which rests on controlling everything from the centre."

Sir Menzies further said "Micro-management by politicians from Whitehall is inefficient and ineffective. No successful business chief executive would try to control every aspect of their operating companies' activities. But Brown and Blair are both avid centralisers."

Commenting on Tony Blair, Sir Menzies said "In his rush for a legacy the Prime Minister is in danger of hanging several mill-stones around the neck of the British economy. Nuclear power is one, timidity on pensions reform is another."

Commenting on tax reform, Sir Menzies said "Our approach to business tax is to make it simpler, to strip out a lot of the complex reliefs and hand the money back to business in lower corporation tax rates."

Commenting on nuclear power Sir Menzies said "No sensible government should guarantee to meet unknown decommissioning costs when the present generation of nuclear power stations may cost up to £90 billion to clean-up. But the alternative is equally damaging: business would pay a heavy price in a rigged market that passed these costs on to energy consumers. Investment in nuclear will discourage investment in other technologies that could supply capacity."

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Read Sir Menzies's speech in full.