Ex-head of CBI rails at TV’s dim view of business

LORD Digby Jones, former director general of the CBI, has fired an angry broadside at the portrayal of business on television, lambasting soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street for depicting businessmen as crooks and villains.

In a speech in Aberdeen at the new corporate headquarters of a leading North Sea service company, he also took a swipe at fellow peer Lord Alan Sugar, the star of television’s The Apprentice, for the show’s “simplistic and damaging” version of how business in Britain is run.

Speaking at the opening of the new offices of Viking SeaTech, the outspoken business leader said: “We do have phenomenal achievements in the UK but we don’t celebrate what we are good at and have ceased to believe in ourselves.

“Here business gets on the agenda merely though gloom or facile entertainment. Business gets a hostile handling from TV entertainment media.

“In Coronation Street, EastEnders and even The Archers when a crook surfaces in a soap storyline, yes, he is a businessman.”

Lord Jones, a former Minister of State for Trade and Investment, said that in The Apprentice Lord Sugar would get out of his Rolls-Royce to tell some unfortunates “You’re fired”.

He said: “Which business in modern Britain is run like that? How simplistic and how damaging that is to society’s expectations and understanding of essential wealth creation.”

He said it was “natural leaders” like Bill Bayliss, Viking SeaTech’s chief executive, in whose hands the UK’s future wealth creation lay. He had worked his way up from a mechanical engineer to launch a Petrofac business unit from scratch, taking it to a $300 million (£186m) turnover.

Lord Jones said fixing Britain called for “inspirational leadership.” But he also warned that only sheer hard work – “putting in the grunt” – would rescue the country from economic decline .

“There are those leaders who reach the top of the pile and who, in the rawest sense, get 20 men to follow them up a hill into fatal gunfire or, in Nelson’s day, into the huge French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar,” he said. “That may be for the very few, but those who do anything whose actions affect somebody else, lead.”

Viking SeaTech, said Lord Jones, was exactly the kind of company required to lead Britain out of recession. Business was not part of the solution to prevent the UK from falling apart – it was the solution.

“Our country has declined to such a state that it is in serious need of fixing. We don’t celebrate what we’re good at. We merely look inward and criticise all the time.”

Lord Jones also stressed recent research by UHY Hacker Young, which revealed Aberdeen is only major city in the UK which had grown during the recession.

“If it wasn’t for wealth creation by UK plc then there would be nothing to spend on schools and hospitals, on police officers on soldiers, on nurses and on teachers. Only business generates taxation. Because of that wealth creation business is at the centre of Britain, more so than any other section of society.”

Viking SeaTech, formerly Viking Moorings, yesterday announced plans to expand in Asia. It has a base in Singapore with one planned for Indonesia.