Mr Ebbers says he wants MCI in order to build a global player in
Posted in General on 14. Aug, 2010
Mr Ebbers says he wants MCI in order to build a global player in a world telecoms market which will be dominated by a small number of mega-corporations. The New York markets preferred one of their own, the fast- talking Bernard Ebbers, whose WorldCom may be a quarter the size of BT, but which was more or less created as a corporate vehicle by the Manhattan investment banks.Strategically, Mr Ebbers is pursuing the same vision as BT’s Sir Iain Vallance, one of Tony Blair’s favourite business leaders. The idea that a huge American telephone company should be taken over by a foreign one – never mind that BT speaks English – did not appeal to Wall Street. It turns out that the free market is not as blind to borders as Mr Reich thought.
But it was highly simplistic, and in key respects – as the BT/MCI debacle shows – simply wrong.
The fact that MCI has been swooped upon by a rival American company, WorldCom, is suggestive of the chauvinism of American finance. This was a new style of thinking for the centre-left, and for New Labour it provided the intellectual rationale for the abandonment of Bennite “socialism in one country” a decade earlier. The only way in such a global economy for the government of one nation to develop a competitive advantage and retain the benefits for its people is to improve their skills, because workers are less mobile than capital and corporations. Mr Reich’s premise was that the large companies which dominate capitalism are footloose and unpatriotic: they owe no loyalty to a country, and will pursue the maximisation of profit regardless of national boundaries. A company could be headquartered in Detroit or London, carry out all its manufacturing in Korea or Vietnam, do its accounting in India and hold its accounts in the Cayman Islands. Five years ago now, Gordon Brown set out the principles of what he called the New Economics. Drawing heavily on the thinking of Robert Reich, President Clinton’s first Labor Secretary, the then shadow chancellor argued that nations could only “add value” by the skill, ingenuity and enterprise of their workforces.
Is what is good for BT good for Britain? This is a large question, and the cancellation of the merger between BT and the American giant MCI requires Labour’s modernisers to clarify the answers they have given so far. Any other approach was incompatible with the language of the relevant statutory provisions.- Kate O’Hanlon, Barrister. The collapse of BT’s ambition to be the world’s leading phone company matters to all of us, not because it will affect the price of a phone call (it probably won’t, much), but because it raises the question of whether Britain needs companies which are global players to succeed in the global economy. The second issue was therefore to be determined adversely to Sefton.With regard to the third issue, Sefton were not entitled to provide their own scale for judging a person’s ability to pay for their own care. The first issue would therefore be determined in the affirmative.Having, however, accepted that a person was in need of care and attention, Sefton were not entitled to say that because of their lack of resources they were not prepared to meet the duty placed on them by section 21.
However, Sefton’s policy was not to use its financial position to provide a standard against which to assess “need” but to defer consideration and payment (because of its lack of resources) where it accepted that there was a need of care and attention.Having regard to the reasoning in Barry it must be concluded that there was a limited subjective element in making the assessment whether the ailments of the person concerned did or did not collectively establish a need for care and attention. He had not, how-ever, had the benefit of argument as to its relevance to the present case.The issue in Barry was whether a local authority could properly take account of its own financial resources when assessing the needs of a disabled person under 2(1) of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970. It then sought to arrive at a sensible prioritisation of persons in need against the background of its available resources.Between the date of the hearing before Jowitt J and the date of his judgment, the House of Lords had decided R v Gloucestershire County Council and anor, ex p Barry (Law Report 9 April 1997) That decision had clearly influenced the judge. Sefton approached those difficulties by assessing individuals whom it felt might require community care services irrespective of their means or the council’s resources. The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal against the decision of Mr Justice Jowitt (Law Report, 18 April 1997) that a council was entitled to take account of its own resources in considering an applicant’s need for accommodation under section 21 of the National Assistance Act and in deciding whether it was under a duty to provide such accommodation.
Richard Drabble QC, Helen Mountfield and Andrew Suddard (Public Law Project) for the appellants; Andrew Gilbart QC and John Barrett (Council Solicitor) for the council.
Lord Woolf MR said that the case raised three issues: 1) whether a local authority in deciding whether an elderly person was in need of care and attention, in which case it would be required to make arrangements for residential accommodation to be made available, was entitled under section 21 of the National Assistance Act 1948 as amended to have regard to its limited financial resources; 2) whether, if its limited resources were relevant, they justified the policy which Sefton had adopted; and 3) whether, in determining if “care and attention is not otherwise available to a person” an authority was entitled to take the resources of that person into account even though they fell below the levels prescribed by regulations for the purposes of sections 22 to 26 of the 1948 Act.The calls on Sefton’s resources available to meet needs in relation to accommodation were subject to greater demands than was the case with other councils because it had a large number of elderly and disadvantaged residents. His two-stroke engine is still the subject of negotiation with a number of companies and he worked closely with the Ford Motor Company on their own Orbital two-stroke development.This recent international standing reflects Hooper’s ability as a designer and development engineer but to the end he regretted that his own Wulf two-stroke design was attracting attention from every branch of the automotive industry except the motorcycle one that saw him mature.- Jim Reynolds. In a brief but enthusiastic sit-in, the workforce approached Hooper and asked him to head a revived company financed by their own redundancy and pension funds, but he could see no realistic future for them or their investment.He moved a few miles from Wolverhampton to a modest research and development on Halfpenny Green airfield, where the list of companies who came to his door included the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, a South East Asian car-maker, Harley-Davidson and Gil Marine of America, the National Research Council of Canada and British Leyland cars. But he was working on more advanced engine concepts than the limited Norton finance would allow for the Commando, including the rotary Wankel engine that enjoyed a brief spell of production in the late 1980s by the much-reduced Norton company.Hooper’s real enthusiasm was for his own double- diameter piston two-stroke design, the “Wulf”, which was never put into production by Norton before they closed their Wolverhampton factory gates in 1977.