Brendan Barber

There are a number of issues at stake with the takeover of Cadbury’s by Kraft. Inevitably free market fundamentalists have accused doubters of being protectionists and little Britishers but the case against this takeover goes much wider than a defence of the iconic nature of the Creme Egg. But unions are right to fight back.

The biggest issue is that this is going to be largely funded by debt. This will mean that Kraft will have to extract significant value out of the business to pay interest and the loan capital. It is a perfectly reasonable public policy objective to discourage highly-leveraged bids of this type.

What makes this worse – as Nick Clegg very effectively pointed out at yesterday’s Prime Ministers’ Questions – is that some of the loan finance is coming from the  publically-owned RBS. It is indeed strange that RBS is funding something that the government has opposed.

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Brendan Barber

The sharp increase in physical assaults against workers highlighted in the British Crime Survey for the last year is hugely concerning, coming after a huge fall in such incidents over the course of the last decade. Whilst levels of assaults are still far lower than ten years ago (Much of which thanks to joint work by unions and employers in sectors such as health care and retail), this has to act as a wake-up call to both the Government and employers.

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A number of right wing commentators and newspapers have been keen to highlight this morning that yesterday’s labour market statistics identified an ‘historic’ gap between public and private sector earnings.

What’s being mentioned is only half the story though. Nicola has a blog post up at Left Foot Forward, filling us in on the half that hasn’t been reported.

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• Cadbury: banks are the real winners
  Robert Peston has found the banks hired to defend Cadbury's from hostile takeover had a very strange incentive structure.
• Galling that RBS should fund Cadbury takeover says Cable
  Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable has written to Lord Mandelson: "It is particularly galling … that state-owned RBS should part fund this takeover when it is clearly not in the interests of the UK economy."
• Cadbury’s and Kraft: what the left needs to consider now
  Darrell Goodliffe asks what can be done to prevent 'another Cadbury's' in this piece on Liberal Conspiracy
• Cadbury and Kraft – public policy should focus on debt, not nationality
  Varun Chandra writes on Left Foot Forward that Kraft's heavily leveraged buyout bodes badly for the Cadbury's business in the UK: "The cost of financing the massive mountain of leverage means that much of the cash generated by the business will be spent not on investment and training, but on interest payments."

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Nicola Smith

Today the Government and the opposition have each launched new policy documents on supporting families. While both recognise the importance of flexible working as a means to allow parents to balance work and care, they also share a lack of wider discussion about the ways in which working lives impact on families.

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Paul Nowak

One of the key election battlegrounds will undoubtedly be public spending, and how best government balances the need to reduce the deficit with ensuring ongoing investment in our public services as Britain begins to emerge from the downturn.

Ireland provides a clear example of what can happen when government gets that balance wrong – and the New Statesman is not alone in suggesting that what is happening across the Irish Sea provides a possible, ‘foretaste of life under the Tories’.

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Nicola Smith

There are still 728,000 young people aged 18-24 out of work. And 159,000 of them have been unemployed for over 12 months. But today’s labour market figures showed that between September – October 2009 the total number of young people out of work fell by by 29,000. This is the first time since April 2008 that there has been a significant reduction in the number of young unemployed people – and while it’s too early to know if this is a start of a trend, it is definitely an encouraging sign, supporting the hypothesis that Government action is working  – it could be time to ask the Conservative party to explain why they would cut programmes that are preventing long-term worklessness.

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John Wood

“One Creme Egg please.”

“That’ll be 50p, sonny.”

“I don’t have any cash.”

“Well, I’m afraid you kind of need to…”

“What if I paid you £5 later?”

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Adam Lent

The Cadbury/Kraft deal repeats all the same mistakes that generated the downsides of the last twenty years:

1. It’s a deal done to enrich shareholders rather than for the benefits of the company;

2. It’s a deal recommended to shareholders by people with a massive vested interest in the deal going ahead (notably the Board and a mass of consultants);

3. It’s a deal that relies heavily on borrowed money to fund the buyout;

4. It’s a deal that allows the supposedly free operation of the market and its benefits to trump other issues such as national identity, job security, and quality of produce even though we know that the mergers and acquisitions have a poor record of improving company performance;

5. And it’s a deal which goes through because it is largely supported by short-term investors after a quick buck than those with a long-term interest in the company.

Maximum discomfort now needs to be felt by Kraft and by those who will benefit from this deal. Only through public and media pressure might we be able to stop another era of pointless and damaging mergers and acquisitions.

The vested interest that drive this activity deserves to be as big a scandal as the bank bonuses.

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• James Purnell MP – Call for Universal Job Guarantee to limit impact of recession
  James Purnell comments on the benefits that a universal job guarantee would have

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