Fringe benefits

IT IS strange how you have an article (Business, 19 April) supporting the No campaign by the CBI director-general John Cridland (based in Bedfordshire) and not by someone from CBI Scotland. Like Prime Minister David Cameron, he starts with patronising drivel about Scots being proud and patriotic and the referendum decision being ours. He then sticks his snout in, making a case which, in essence, says that Scots can’t manage on their own without big boys like him to nanny us.

He claims that the CBI represents 500,000 employees in Scotland. Really? Well, that would be a bare fifth of the working population, which shows how little relevance his organisation has here. In fact, the CBI represents no employees, other than a few in the upper echelons of management. It represents a handful of (usually) larger organisations; more specifically owners, shareholders, general managers and suchlike and represents a few hundred, at best a couple of thousand, members. The CBI, for all its noise, is a fringe organisation in Scotland and an interference from outside it.

Thomas R Burgess

St Catherine’s Square
Perth