CAN MANDY SAVE CADBURY’S?

07-12-2009

Business Secretray Lord Mandelson’s warning to Kraft over its potential takeover of Cadbury’s – he’s said that any potential purchaser must “respect the brand” – amounts to nothing more than posturing and will do nothing to reassure thousands of workers at Bournville anxiously awaiting news of their future.

On the face of it, a hard-nosed American enterprise hardly sounds like the idea purchaser for the Birmingham firm, which still embodies in the public mind the best of philanthropic British enterprise.

The brutal truth is that this ceased to matter in the moment Cadbury’s became a PLC.

Now its future rests entirely in the hands of its shareholders who are unlikely – like shareholders the world over – to be swayed by sentiment. The bottom line is all that counts.

We may well lament this fact, and there are good arguments for retaining local or national control of major manufacturers – and restricting the export of jobs.

The trouble is that, until now, no one in government has been putting this case. Indeed, the opposite is true. This is an administration which cheerfully embraced the doctrines of globalisation and the free market.

It smacks of cheap politicking for Mandelson to play the patriot card now – and his dire warnings amount to nothing more than headline-grabbing bluster.

That the takeover deal might be brokered by a nationalised bank – RBS – merely underlines Labour’s self-willed impotence in industrial policy.

Mandelson as Cadbury’s White Knight? As if. He doesn’t even cut it as the Milk Tray Man.

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