30th January 2014
The Prime Minister
Dear Sir,
It is with some trepidation that I see you claiming to promote small businesses in Britain.
About thirty four years ago I objected strongly to the introduction of legislation aimed at destroying small businesses which inverted and perverted approximately 1000 years of social and political development by introducing laws which placed the onus of proof upon the accused instead of upon the accuser.
This is the huge swathes of law disguised under the titles Health and Safety, Employment Law and a host of subsidiary legislation so thick that it is virtually impenetrable. Have you ever tried reading the hmrc website? I defy even the finest lawyer in the kingdom to do so with any understanding of its huge and diverse tentacles. Have you ever been on the wrong end of a health and Safety policy which requires about 1000 pages to cover a business with six employees. The average small business employer cannot even read it let alone understand and apply it.
I ran a small manufacturing company for fifty years without a single accident or incident and totally without any written policy. I used good judgment and common sense; something which now seems to be in very short supply.
The vagaries of employment law cannot be believed by anybody who does not have to suffer it. It is a diabolical mess.
The source of most of this misery is the fancy lawyers, who seem to abound in Westminster, and therefore make most of these grossly offensive and unjust laws and their purpose is clearly to line their own pockets without regard for the consequence - which is the destruction of Britain’s industry. More accurately, that is the destruction of those who are capable of producing wealth – without which the country will die. You create wealth by taking material from the ground by farming or mining and converting those products into saleable goods through industry. There is no other way to create wealth and all other functions, though many of them are necessary, are simply redistributing wealth.
The correct function of The City is to finance the producers of wealth but the problem with Western civilisation at the moment is that most financial activity is devoted to asset stripping and not to producing wealth. But the real evil is reserved to your shyster lawyer friends in parliament who have passed laws with a presumption of guilt against any entrepreneur brave and stupid enough to employ anyone. The current favourite ploy is to make a claim for deafness. How can anyone prove they did not cause someone else’s deafness?
There is no requirement to prove that the deafness was caused by any action at all. The onus is to prove that the employer did not cause it. That is, in principle and fact, impossible. The law is utterly evil. A friend of mine recently had to settle for a claim by a seventy-five year old who left the company concerned five years before the present owner was born. There is no justification for the claim at all but my friend cannot possibly prove that but the rotten law demands that he do so. It is impossible. He settled for £25,000. £10,000 for his “defence lawyer”, £3,000 for the alleged “victim” and £12,000 for the shyster who brought this evil case. He never caused any damage to anybody. The litigant was not required to provide any proof but the defendant was required to prove that he had not done it. How? It’s impossible!
Both I and my son are regularly assaulted by evil phone callers offering to sue on our behalf. This is a national disgrace and is designed by shyster lawyers to rip the guts out of British manufacturing without any valid justification.
If you really want to rejuvenate British Manufacturing then you must first get rid of this destructive and deliberate evil. I will remind you, once again, that the purpose of government is to protect its citizens and not to subject them to laws that are impossible to observe. Are employers, those who create wealth, not citizens? It appears not.
I have used some strong language here and I hope that it offends you. Then you might experience to the extent of one tenth of one percent the offence that I and other producers of wealth feel by being assaulted by these unjust laws every minute of our lives.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Walker.
Ref promoting small businesses.docx