YouSaid · the spoken record

Rupert Soames

lines on the record: 41
first: 2024-10-31
most recent: 2024-10-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I have confidence in confidence alone Of course I do. Every major family event, we sit down and watch the sound of mute. You have to agree, you have confidence in me.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But just getting that thing that business sees this as a whole and we have a joint objective of getting confidence back into the boardroom, not a one company, not a two companies, but of hundreds of thousands of companies in this country.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because it's early days yet. They've only just got into a government. I personally am a complete iconoclast. I think they've done fine in the first hundred days. I mean, all this stuff about sort of scandal and everything like that. I mean, governments need 100 days to sort them out. It's a stupid thing, frankly, to go and set as a target. It works well in companies, but not so well in government. But, you know, see, the rubber has hit the road in October. We've had the investment summit. We've got the infrastructure planning. We've appointed two really strong people in Poppy Guston and Barclay. We've had the budget. The rubber has hit the road with this government, but they've got, we hope that they will, really genuinely. And we've got to be humble as business, not going in all guns blazing and say,”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People say, Oh, they're going to go to America. They're not going to go to America. They're being bought by private equity because there's not enough liquidity in the market.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Needs to be wrong. We need to get on and reform planning. And Angela Arena has been doing some absolute stunning stuff. She's called in a whole lot of major programs and say, no, no, no, no, we're not letting this be bogged down. And we've got to be more punchy about going and putting pylons across the country. I'm really sorry for people who live in pylon country, but unless we get the pylons built, we'll not be able to do a sustainable energy thing and regulation that I was knock me over with a feather. At the investment summit, the Prime Minister stands up and says, we've got to get our regulations. So I had never expected that he would recognize that for what it's better. But I'm doing a program at the moment or called the listed companies project. We are stock market, our UK stock market has lost a third of the company's listed in there.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think they've got to have, first of all, come to a sensible landing point on the employment stuff, to make employing people a non-scary thing to do. And that is really important because people ask it. You know, people are being hauled through industrial tribunals. And, you know, this is also saying to government, you are the biggest employer in the country of people. The staff turnover in public services of about 25%, you're going to be hiring half a million people a year. How many of those do you want to be taking to industrial tribunals and stuff like that? We've got to go and have a sensible landing place between unions, between government and between business where that can work. We've got to look at reforming the apprenticeship levy, which is meant to be about training people. It's not about training people. It's a tax because it's things that that need.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also we've got to get the confidence of people to come back to the we're going to do project go for it. Well, give us a”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they are doing it and they've got a lot of consultations out. But I think... What we need to persuade government of is getting the bits of the jigsaw right and getting into their mind they need to be to get this confidence. Now they're doing some things about it. So the tax roadmap, which the CBI was arguing for, flagship CBI policy, she's done it. She's set out a tax roadmap for the next five years. That's bringing stability.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internet, we've got AI coming along, we've got all these things coming along. We've got so many opportunities for this country. We can turn this country around and get it motoring again. And we've got the challenge of how in a post-Brexit world we've got to be better than the others. We've got to be a better country than that. So what thinking about the slavery, I mean, I'm sure it's really, really interesting. It doesn't float my boat.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, attacks on my grandfather are something that we sort of get used to. The great thing is that a church or college Cambridge is the definitive of all the archives. There's not a document that you can't get about my grandfather, and he lived in a different age and spoke a different language. And I think that you can't go through life being worried about having to feel that you got to protect every single thing. People have different views and different ways of looking at history. But my whole life has been about looking forward, informed by that. I love history, but actually I'm restless. And I want to go for there's so much, you know, if I consider how my life and my family's life is so much better than it was 20 or 25 years ago, there's been huge progress.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was a huge achievement, and it was a huge achievement in one way, is that he went against the express wishes of the Prime Minister. Mrs. Thatcher did not expect for a moment that Mugabe would win a democratic election and my father fought brilliantly and ready well to say we're either doing this as a democracy or we're not. And he had the genius idea of getting English policemen come out 250, 300. I still meet people who say I was with your father in Rhodesia and they were wearing their beat uniform standing outside the ballot boxes.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god, I do because I went out that for a bit. And when my father was flying down there to go to the, and was not able to fly over Africa because African nations say they were going to shoot the aircraft down. That was a bit nervous. But there were sort of a wonderful moments. My father was very close to Henry Kissinger. And there was sort of a shot of my father coming off the VC10 going down the steps. And as he got into the car to drive to Government House with my mother, with lots of social security around and the telephone goes, they had government comms and says, it's Mrs. Kissinger to speak to, sir. And it was Nancy Kissinger ringing up and said, Henry says it's very bad to have brown shows with a blue suit. Understand stories. That's the real life. Spotted. You can't wear brown, which my father had not changed his issues.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's worse than that. He stole the chef from the Elysee Palace to come and cook the British Embassy because the chef wanted to go somewhere where food was more appreciated.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“his successor. So he was sent out in 68 with my mother, who was the secret weapon because de Gaulle admired her father enormously. And the European project was hugely important to us as a family. And we were very heavily implicated, and I became fascinated by it.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think that the things that make you good at business are not necessarily things that equip you for being good in politics and vice versa. And over the last 20, 25 years, we've had a professionalization of politics and the gap in understanding between politicians of all parties and business has grown ever wider. And that's one of the things that the CBI can do. But I've always been, my idea of, I got into public service. I saw a Greco. If you never, I've stood on a hilltop above Sana in the Yemen and turned on the generators and seen the lights come on. That's public service.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I will also politics has always been really close to her being. And I had to take a decision when I was sort of 28, 29 about whether I was going to continue in industry or go into politics. And I think I had enough self-knowledge then to realize that I would not make a very good politician. It's such a really tough geek politics.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes down to our serious governments interested in outcomes, or are they interested in who people are employed to abide to achieve those outcomes?”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think just look at the budget. This was a serious budget delivered by serious people. We have a serious problem of productivity in the public services, particularly in the NHS. And the idea that people are going to sit around and say, hmm, what is more important? The fact that these public services are delivered well and efficiently or that they're delivered by people whose paycheck happens to say HM government. The idea that you have better control and better control of costs and management if people are your own employees is for the birds. It's that government has much better control because it's got much better visibility actually on outsourced work than it does on insource work. But this is a world that I'm a past, but fundamentally.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's always an incentive for behavior, bad behavior. People don't need incentive to go and behave badly. Just look at all the scandals in public service that we hear about, all the time, the blood scandal. The behaving badly. And one of the things that I said to my customers when we were in Sarko was to say that we employ 55,000 people delivering public services worldwide. The one service that we can guarantee that we are delivering 24 by 7 is that someone somewhere is doing something stupid. The question is, how do you deal with it? How do you respond to it? How do you own up to it?”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always an incentive to innovate, to bring change, to go and do things differently. It's not about, I mean, every prison in the land has a budget. It has a budget and they're not allowed to overspend it. So you can go and say that the people running public prisons are only there to make sure that they don't go over their budget. We had a budget, and yes, it had about 5% that was called profit. Well, I mean, we invested huge amounts of money in training good people to do that. It's allowed. What the important thing is, what was the outcome? And the outcome on the whole was prisons that ran really, really well for lower case and had better outcomes.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I most certainly do. I think they're wrong, and I will spend hours debating for nine years. I spent hours debating them. And I would argue that I always won the argument because what it comes down to is output. Are you interested in who delivers services or how well they are delivered? We're talking about taxpayers' money looking after people who are at really difficult times in their lives who don't have the capacity to argue. What is more important? That it's done well and done for good value for money or it's done by people who are employees of the state.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you keep stumbling across things that he said and did and his vocabulary was huge. And you don't have to know him to read him. I mean, his speeches and stuff like that. Do you know one of the things that I did at Serco was I was so pleased with is that he was home secretary and he wrote a treatise about treatment of people in prisons. And I went along to the people who are running our prisons trading program and said, you know, show me the program front of their training program. Is Winston Churchill's speech in the House of Commons about treating prisoners well and that it is the denial of freedom that is the punishment, not keeping people in dank and ghastly and horrible conditions.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but very waving at him, sitting on his knee, doing all this stuff, but I can't pretend that I sort of imbued a great deal of political philosophy from him in his whatever it was.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she said, I've no idea, I've never been anything else. So I don't know what else to say. He died when I was six. It's obviously a huge privilege.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They sure did. And for the first sort of 16 years, maybe 20 years of my working life, I was very, very aware that lots of people were saying the only reason why he's ever promoted is who he knows not what he knows. And coming back to grit in oyster, proving those people wrong by working incredibly hard and also running fast and doing things and hopefully doing them not entirely shabbily was a big motivator to prove to them that I wasn't just there because of who I knew.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I ended up being responsible for a factory making weighing scales in the armpit of the M5 and the M6 in Smith. Averret. It was bloody glass. No, to me, that's the point. To me, it was glamorous. I thought it was wonderful being on the shop floor and seeing people who, that's where I learnt, that people who do the job know how to do it best. It's not the smarties. Who knows how to do it? It's the”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I left university, it was a time of Big Bang, and nearly all my contemporaries went to work in the city. I reckon they were cleverer than me, but I'd always loved making things. And I'd always loved things. I grew up farming a lot of farm. Running around with the milk marketing board and farming. Going somewhere where there were real people making real things, I find incredibly exciting. And I was lucky enough to work for a company called GC, and I worked there for 16 years under one of the greatest industrialists the UK has ever known, who was incredibly kind to me. He's a man called Arnold Weinstock. And during that period of time, I got to run businesses in airborne electronics and software. I ran the last minicomputer manufacturer in the UK.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there wasn't much more of an element, is I loved making things. And first of all, my career at Oxford was the evidence that youth and discretion are ill-matched companions. I paddled in many pools at Oxford. Some of them would now be regarded as disreputable. But I would say I did get 3,000 people to vote for me to be President of the Oxford Union and at the same time was a DJ among the most successful night clubs in London.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was, and I've often asked myself, I've always seen myself, yes, I'm an insider. I've had an incredibly privileged upbringing, I'm an accident, a sperm that happened. I can't do anything. I've always felt slightly different. I've been trying to say, why is that? I think it was partly the bit of grit in the oyster was I knew I was a mistake. So my mother had four children really, really fast. And then I popped along five years later and she finally did say, okay, everybody, you were a mistake, but a much-loved mistake, she said. But the fact is, I had four siblings who were glamorous and fun and intelligent, and they were off doing their, I had two parents who were actually very well known in politics. They were doing things. They were on the front of the newspapers. So what do I do? What do I do? I've got a high bar to go.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recovering from an operation says, Right, out of bed, come on, you're taking your IV things. We're going to walk up and down this thing. And I know it hurts, but we're going to jolly well get onto it and get the match fit again. That's my job.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it may have been, but it's not now. It's absolutely up and doing its job of representing the interests of our members and of business being the voice of business to government and also engaging with government. The recovery time of this has been immense. I've done it three times in my life. I went to be CEO of a company called Agreco, where the previous chief executive, who was much loved, who'd created the company, in effect, was tragically killed in a train crash. And they had no leaders. Sarko, I arrived there where they were in an existential crisis, having the biggest customer having accused them of lying, cheating and stealing. So going to places where there has been trouble and then I tell up, and what I see my role as being is slightly like the physio in a hospital. I'm the person who comes along after you.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, but there is no doubt at all in my mind that they sincerely believe, they get it, that the thing that they need to achieve, that we as a nation need to achieve is economic growth. We've had none for the last 15 years. Our GDP per capita has grown by 0.4% a year since 2008. Frankly, it's pathetic.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good regulation, we get more concerns about the way regulation has gone, where we seem to be in a world where for fear of any horse We go and put hobbles, we let mountains of grass, we go and put hobbles on them for fear that one of them is going to go do lally. And we have 99 horses or 99 chickens in the coup all being restrained because of the fear of one behaving badly. We've got to get away from this thing of trying to stop any sort of risk, any sort of, and we've got to get into a state where we allow people to run free.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, A is not big business, it's medium-sized and small businesses, but the proof will be in the pudding. And if the OBR is saying that after spending all this money, the government's own economists will only go to grow the economy by 1.5%, then obviously something's not working here. And our prescription for this is really simple. Make sure there's a combined national effort where we can make Britain a better place for business post-Brexit than any other country in the G7 to come and invest and grow jobs. And that requires policy to be joined up between business and government. And for the jigsaw of policy and budgets and regulation to fit together, and I mentioned regulation there, I'm not going to let you off that one. I mean, the regulator, Britain used to be really well known.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a high risk, or businesses are going to be in different circumstances, but whether it's letting them go or hiring fewer, it's not going to help the 9 million people who are not in work, and it's not going to help get the flywheel of the economy turning, which is what the government wants to do. It's what we want to do.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are what we, I would say, are contradictory. And we need to, the government's been pretty good on getting together with the CBI and others to consult on stuff. But it must realize you can't go and keep ladling business with things that discourage employment and expect businesses to employ more people.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's more the sun are going to find it more expensive. The question is, are they going to be motivated to go and take more people on? And, you know, the apprenticeship levy remains the same as it is. It's basically a tax. They could have reformed that. But what I'd like to do is I just wish to ask people to close their minds and imagine they're sitting around a boardroom table, one of the hundreds of thousands of businesses in this country. And what we want to do is for that meeting to end with the minutes that say the board voted unanimously to support Project GoFit. And this is the missing bit. This is the missing bit between 1.5% GDP growth, which doesn't touch the size, and two to two and a half if we can go and unleash, give business the confidence to invest. And the signals at the moment”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To potentially make employment more risky because we've got an employment rights bill, which is meant to go and reset the relationship between employers and employees.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what business is going to do is look at this budget and the whole government policy in the round. And to be successful, the budget is one part of this jigsaw. But let's just take the other thing about our economy. There are over 9 million people of working age who are not looking for work. So how are you going to grow an economy? We've got 22% of your workforce not working. We need to pull those people back into work. And yet on employment where almost the entire burden of taxation that is coming in this budget is on taxes related to employment. And it's not only the tax, so the cost of employing people is going up, particularly of young people, because the living wage is going up. We've got the national insurance contributions going up. But then, having said that, we're then going to...”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not enough, exactly. Not enough banquets, but there should be much more bang for the buck. And the OBR has said, if you do all these things, if you raise all these taxes, if you do this, you're going to get 1.5% against a government that has as its ambition that our country should be the fastest growing economy in the G7. And let me tell you, one and a half percent GDP growth does not touch that.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, just to put it in context, I think that nobody in the business community wants to see this government be anything less than successful, particularly in its ambition to drive growth into the UK economy. So nobody wishes it ill. It was a humdinger of a budget. One might even say a whopper of a budget. And before we get into where it hits most, which is in business, the odd thing was we're spending $40 billion raising it and more for investment and everything like that to produce a growth outlook that says 1.5% GDP growth at the end of this parliament.”
2024-10-31 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Rupert Soames CBI One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source