In a statement Vince Cable said: “We know that people’s living standards have been affected and some groups have been particularly affected, the Muslim communities in the UK are among them. We can’t accept that. So what the Government has to do and what we are doing, is first of all, we’ve got to have financial stability, because otherwise we’d have a catastrophe of the kind they’re having in Southern Europe.”
The Business Secretary then went on to say: “Then we got to encourage growth, encourage business, small business in particular, with tax policies, new regulation, helping the skill development, helping with exports, all the things that get business moving and get jobs created.”
Some European countries have already been forced to seek a bail-out. Fears are also that Britain may be among those heading for a double-dip recession. The crisis has led to significant rises in unemployment with ethnic minorities being affected the most, especially the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities.
“It’s not going to be easy,” Cable warned. “It’s a slow process, but we’re doing the right thing,” he insisted, deflecting criticism that the Government’s austerity measures are making the situation worse.
“The new economic situation is very serious and not just in Britain. I mean, Britain is actually less affected at the moment than the rest of Europe, certainly the Eurozone countries, even the United States is having serious trouble and other parts of the world, China, are slowing down.” he said.
The argument by the Government is that the crisis is global, was caused by the previous Labour Government and the lack of oversight and regulation of the financial sector. “It stems from the excessive of the last decade where we had these banks which got too big and behaved very badly and collapsed, causing enormous damage,” Cable said. He warned that the enormous deficits run up as a consequence cannot be sustained but was “very tough, very hard” for the coalition to deal with.
In his interview, the Business Secretary was again confronted by the intractable problem of the lack of diversity among the parliamentary ranks of the Liberal Democrats in the face of some progress by the other two major parties over the last decade. “We really aspire to represent ethnic communities, particularly the Muslim community,” he said. “.We’ve now put in place whole candid policies to support and then serve potential candidates, we want to be more representative, it is very much at the top of our priorities.”
There are no Muslims Lib Dem MPs. Labour has six and Conservatives, two.
© Islam Times
