A Fabian Society report urges Labour to be more “business-friendly” (Report, 16 January). But in This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein shows how the fossil-fuel industry has subverted environmental organisations and governments from effective action on climate change. Jonathon Porritt has decided he can no longer work with them. The Tax Justice Network shows that almost all the FTSE 100 companies use tax havens to avoid tax. Top business incomes have gone on rising, while most people’s real incomes have fallen, and only a tiny minority of companies are living-wage employers. The tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, banking, food and insecticide industries fight almost every regulatory attempt to limit the harm they do. In Lethal But Legal, Nicholas Freudenberg documents how the antisocial policies of major business sectors inflict major damage on public health.
As corporations bigger than many national economies run rings round governments, a clash between corporate power and the democratic state looks as inescapable and as far-reaching as the historical clash between church and state. Is Labour business-friendly, or merely business-fearful?
Richard Wilkinson
Emeritus professor of social epidemiology
• I agree with Peter Mandelson when he says he would prefer further bands of council tax to the mansion tax (Report, 20 January). However, to describe the mansion tax as crude continues the campaign by Tony Blair and his acolytes to belittle “the wrong brother”. They can’t forgive him for preventing his Blairite brother from leading the party. It is now apparent that these yesterday’s New Labour architects would rather have Cameron continue his devastation of the welfare state than see Ed in No 10.
Eddie Dougall
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
• This article was amended on 26 January 2015. Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the letter from Richard Wilkinson included a reference to the Equality Trust in the attribution under his name.
