Robert Paston
speaker
388 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 10 Jun
Robert Paston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But special tax breaks, I'm just inherently anxious about, and I'm particularly anxious about,
about a Britain whose economy really did change fairly fundamentally in 2007, 2008, after the financial crisis.
Before that, I would say that we'd had about 20 years of a sort of ideology, which I think is the right kind of ideology,
which is that if businesses run into difficulties, you create a sort of administration bankruptcy system that smooths the release of capital and allows those resources to go somewhere else to create new businesses.
And equally, when people lose leave their jobs, you need a retraining system and a welfare system.
that basically helps those people into new employment and minimizes the very significant social costs that arise when a business goes bust.
But I do fundamentally believe that an economy that thinks that all businesses have to be propped up under all circumstances, eventually, and I think we have moved more in that direction, becomes a low growth, low productivity, low wage economy.
And I do think, actually, broadly, part of the problem that we've had since 2007, 2008 is not, I mean, people are going to scream at me, I imagine, when they hear this, but I think not enough businesses have gone bust since then.
And we would be in a better place if more businesses had gone bust and more of the talent from those businesses and more of the capital from those businesses had been redeployed to more productive businesses.
So I immediately slightly recoil when I hear politicians making special pleading for particular sectors.
It's different from saying we need support for growing new sectors.
Of course, in a global competition, you want to make sure that you're providing scale up finance to...
You know, businesses that are going to be world beaters.
And you can provably see that these have the potential to be world leading, highly productive firms.
But propping up businesses that have over a period of years failed to increase their productivity and indeed have been going in the opposite direction.
I just think that is the way to penury as an economy.
Before I get hate mail as a result of Steph's characterisation of my parent, unbelievable insensitivity to the needs of small high street businesses.
That is not my position.
My position is broadly there should be a level playing field so that there is no disincentive to grow.
And secondly, we should not be protecting businesses that cannot be competitive, right?
Showing 61–80 of 388 · page 4 of 20
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