Most, though not all, of the best quotes are distorted.
That is to say, the popular version tends to be a summary of what the great -- or not so great -- actually said.
Thus everyone is familiar with the quote "What's good for General Motors is good for the US" -- the only problem being A president said it, not THE President.
Sometimes this quote is attributed to President Franklin Roosevelt, or President Herbert Hoover or even President Woodrow Wilson. And Wilson is nearest to the mark, because it was indeed President Wilson who said it, only the President Wilson in question was President Charles Wilson, President of -- you've guessed it -- General Motors between 1941 and 1953.
The occasion was a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Jan. 15, 1953, when Wilson was testifying at the time of his proposed nomination for the post of US secretary of defense.
Such was the leisurely pace of the media in those days that the testimony was not reported in the New York Times until nine days later.
What Wilson, who went on to become the US Defense Secretary, actually said was: "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."
The reason why this great quote comes back to mind at the moment is that very recently UK business has begun to complain that the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is not supportive enough of British industry and therefore, a la Wilson, of the national interest. This follows six years when Blair had gone out of his way to court business and entrepreneurship, even to the point of saying at one stage that he personally had no problem with the huge disparities of income and wealth that tended to arise when entrepreneurs were given free rein (a great contrast to the position of most of his predecessors in Labour governments of the past).
Indeed one of the points that distinguishes Blair's "New Labour" from "Old Labour" is that, having castigated the previous Conservative right-wing governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major at almost every turn during the years 1979 to 1997, he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown once in power went on to coolly accept most of the Thatcher Settlement, including the huge redressing of the power balance between employers and trade unions, as well as dramatic cuts in income tax.
What bothers spokesmen for British industry is regulation in general and regulation ostensibly emanating from the EU in Brussels in particular. I say "ostensibly" because often regulations blamed on Brussels bureaucrats have been agreed -- if not actually initiated -- by member governments of the EU, including the UK.
The burden on British industry is not especially onerous by European standards. Indeed, a report not long ago by the international management guru Michael Porter found that, when it came to regulation and taxes, the UK came out relatively well among the 30 or so member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Brown goes out of his way to cultivate businessmen. Large sections of his recent speeches read as if they could have been written by Thatcher's speech writers of old. Brown's philosophy, adapted to UK industry, is not dissimilar from that of president Wilson of General Motors. He would like a thriving, business-friendly economy, because he believes that only in this way can he implement Labour's plans (or what is left of them) for creating a "fair society."
Yet it has to be said, there is something of a gap between the business-friendly rhetoric and the actual performance of British Industry.
For all Brown's efforts to encourage research, development and entrepreneurship, new figures show that in the third quarter of this year new investment by manufacturers in plant and machinery fell to the lowest level for 20 years.
While the British economy as a whole has bucked the general trend, and not experienced a scintilla of recession during any of the dark days that followed the 1990s boom, the UK manufacturing base has been hit by a chronically high pound sterling, which has had a damaging effect on competitiveness, exports and new investment.
The output of British manufacturing is barely above the levels Labour inherited in 1997, whereas it is some 15 percent higher in the eurozone and almost 20 percent in the land of General Motors.
Many commentators shrug their shoulders and say that Britain's future lies increasingly in services. Can an economy of 60 million people defy Wilson's dictum, and prove that the national welfare can be independent of the General Motors of this world? I doubt it.
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