The Balloon Has Gone Up

Here:

In this week’s NS Interview, the Virgin Group founder, Richard Branson, tells David Miliband that Europe should have a single army: “Governments worldwide are spending more than they’re making. So, if you take the army, air force and navy, it would seem to make great sense for us to try to work as one in Europe. We’d end up having a much more powerful army, maybe an air force to try to defend the continent as a whole, and would reduce cost dramatically by working with the rest of Europe. I suspect we will end up going to war less often because we will know that Europe is that much stronger when it comes to defence and we will save a lot of money.”

Branson also calls for the privatisation of BBC Radio 1 as part of looking into “every single aspect” for saving money in Britain: “As much as it’s great to have the BBC as a public-service operator, if you privatised Radio 1, gave it strict remits, put the money back into the rest of the BBC, that would help fund the public-service aspect of the BBC and it would make sense.”

Asked by Miliband about the crisis of culture in banking, Branson reveals that he tax-dodged when he was younger: “I learned my lesson when I was 21 years old when I had a rap on my knuckles for trying to save some money on exporting some records and not paying my taxes properly. And I decided that I wanted to sleep well at night.”

Businesses would be foolhardy, says Branson, to not hire tax lawyers: “Our English companies will pay British taxes, our overseas companies will pay overseas taxes and lawyers will tell us how to mitigate taxes as much as possible. Every company will take that kind of advice. And not to take that advice leaves you uncompetitive.”

Where to begin? Everything that some of us have been saying for years, and years, and years about the union between the very worst of the 1960s and the very worst of the 1980s. Or Blairism, to give that union its name. The Blairism now led by David Miliband.