Renthusiast2.0

A recent poll conducted by London First, who represent the capital’s top 300 businesses, including British Airways and leading banks, found that 49 per cent of them thought Conservative leader David Cameron would be installed in Downing Street after the next election. Just 28 per cent backed Gordon Brown, while 23 per cent thought the next election would result in a hung parliament.
Jo Valentine, London First’s chief executive, said: ‘This appears to be a reflection of concern over the ability of Labour or, more specifically, Gordon Brown to deliver for London.’
Valentine said London’s bosses were frustrated that the Chancellor has not resolved funding for Crossrail, the multi-billion pound rail link connecting Heathrow – Europe’s busiest airport – with the Square Mile and Canary Wharf. This is seen as an urgent transport priority and has been the subject of concerted lobbying by the capital’s business leaders.
In a vindication of London Mayor’s Ken Livingstone controversial congestion charge, 58 per cent of the capital’s bosses believed that the policy was working.
Livingstone will also take heart from business leaders’ opinion of his own performance. When asked whether London was better off with a Greater London Authority, 58 per cent of bosses agreed, with 17 per cent believing the capital would be better off with no government. But the future according to London’s business elite belongs to Shanghai which, after the UK capital, will be the most important city in the world by 2020.
[via Guardian]

Gordon Brown’s BBC interview
Excerpt from transcript:

JON SOPEL: Okay, let’s talk about the style of government closer to home. You are regularly depicted as a control freak, centralising, totally un-collegiate, was one of the phrases, and yet you’re the man who gave independence to the Bank of England, to set interest rates. What is the real Gordon Brown.

GORDON BROWN: Well the real er, Chancellor, is, is the person who er, not only made the Bank of England independent, and gave Executive power away, made the Financial Services Authority, independent of government, and gave that power away. Er, helped to create the new competition authority, where we devolved power for competition decisions from government, and it’s now independent of government, created the regional agencies that took power from Whitehall and pushed that power down to the regions and of course championed Welsh and Scottish devolution, which was power taken from the centre and handed to people who could make the decision by elected parliaments in this case, themselves. Now, that is what government ought to be about, power being devolved. Centralized power being broken up and I believe that in the next few years, the next stage of that can be entered in to.

JON SOPEL: What does that mean.

GORDON BROWN: That, if you take the Bank of England, what we actually did when we made the Bank of England independent was two things. One is we gave Executive Power away and I believed that in other areas, we can do that. And if I just give you an example, the distinction between what happened before we made the Bank of England independent and after, is that government still set the general policy, an inflation target of 2% now, but the administration of that was clearly in the hands of people who were better able to do it, free from short term political influences, able to take a long term view of what was right. Now, to separate the making of policy from the execution of policy, is something that I think is a model that we should look at in other areas of government as well. And I think you’ll find…

JON SOPEL: (interjection) I, I just keep saying like what.

GORDON BROWN: But I think you’ll find over the next, over the next few years that we will see how we can both give power away, the Executive renounces power that it previously had, and that will restore. [via BBC]