IN The Sunday Times Business News of August 30, 1970, Malcolm Crawford reported: A cut in corporation tax from 45% to 40% is being considered as the first of the new government’s tax reductions. Ministers have been discussing ways of stimulating investment, but are afraid of a general consumer boom. They have ruled out an increase in investment grants, which have been under Tory fire ever since Labour introduced them in 1966, and sooner or later are likely to go.
Ministers contend that corporation tax cuts would be a signal to industry that the government believes in profits as the fuel that makes the capitalist machine work.
Stephen Fay reported: The impact on the motor industry of the 5,000 GKN Sankey strikers will multiply rapidly this week as union officials search desperately for a formula that will get the men back to work.
Meanwhile, motor manufacturers are beginning to count the cost of this year’s explosion of supplier strikes. Investment is already cut; the most pessimistic export forecasts are taken as the norm; and more supplies are being imported from Europe.
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Peter Kellner reported: Britain’s economic stake in independent Africa may soon be in jeopardy, according to a disturbing new report by a former Foreign Office official. Miss Barbara Rogers, until recently a high-ranking mem–ber of the Foreign Office southern Africa department, says that civil servants and the government are guilty of a “lack of understanding for African attitudes, and the position of other Commonwealth countries”.
It comes at a time of renewed doubts about Britain’s economic relations with South Africa. Miss Rogers’s report suggests that Britain’s heavy political and financial involvement in South Africa is questionable on economic, and not just moral, grounds.