India is an attractive business proposition precisely because it is poor. The CBI's argument, although it would never be couched in such terms, is that Britain is less attractive because it is not poor, and therefore exploitable, enough.It may suit Mrs Hewitt to flatter British businesspeople as charitable visionaries, but it's doubtful that helping the poor in India is anything other than a convenient fig-leaf for most members of the CBI. Since call centre workers in India are often qualified to degree level, and find wages generous that in Britain would be considered small enough to be illegal, there is a suspicion that Britain's businesses are not moving their operations abroad for entirely ideological reasons.On the contrary, the call centre controversy is a perfect illustration of the farcical double-bind that the global economy delivers. The same unions that are now demanding action be taken against companies that move their telephone services abroad are the ones which a few years ago were quietly horrified by the genesis of the centres in Britain.In the mid-to-late Nineties, low wages, appalling conditions and high turnover of staff due to stress and anxiety were bothering industrial activists involved in the development of call centres.

Now that conditions have been forced up, the jobs are evaporating, and suddenly call centre work is not a growing menace but a terrible loss. In India, of course, the low wages and appalling conditions have been magically transmogrified into high wages and prestigious conditions, and all at a fraction of the price.Clearly, it's all relative in the global employment market. Of course, in an unequal world, one man's feast is another's famine. But what is sinister about the liberal globalist view - that opening markets will spread prosperity - is that this is not simply a matter of heaving everybody upwards It is a matter also of heaving some people down. This is why the trend in globalisation is for countries to become wealthier as they expand their global markets, but for wealth disparity within the countries to become greater.The appeal to businesses of staffing call centres from India is obvious.

But business is not content with offering practical reasons for its decisions, let alone looking honestly at the less charming consequences of its actions. Why admit that you're thinking only of the bottom line, when the top guns of Government will turn up in person to be told that it is their mildly social democratic policies which are driving a desperate business sector to seek the largest profit possible.British business, when explaining why it is moving so many jobs abroad, is keen to mutter about the "skills gap". But, as ever, British business is less keen when it comes to investing cash in addressing the self-same, much-cited skills gap. (Why should they, you may ask, when government ministers will praise them for simply upping sticks and employing Indian graduates as a response to perceived gaps in our own labour market?)Defending the Government's ambition to have 50 per cent of school leavers go into higher education, Mr Blair explained: "It is projected that employers' demands for highly skilled workers is set to increase by two million in the next 10 years. Our goal should be more world-class institutions advancing both excellence and opportunity..."This would seem like just the sort of expansion that British business leaders would be keen to support. But instead they secretly prefer the status quo, which is free higher education for their own children, and mutterings about the skills gap, when they choose to exploit the graduates of other countries by employing them in jobs and under conditions that they would rather die than let their own highly educated children undergo.The message of the CBI conference, with its whingeing about regulation, taxation, and so on, being the driving concern behind its drift abroad is that Britain's businessmen want to be even richer, while those who work to generate their wealth, should be all the poorer.

When even Labour ministers turn up to say that on the contrary, their strategies form part of a crusade against world poverty, we should be very worried indeed.Globalisation may well spread wealth around the world. But if we are not very careful it will leave poverty in its wake. Those who are losing their jobs to Indian graduates are getting a taste of that now. And the Government is learning that no amount of support for the business community is ever enough for a socially progressive government.

• Which is to tell him to take a running jump
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• Outside St Paul's Basilica many mourners felt the same way
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• The investigation is about a 12yearold boy
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• 5 per cent in exchange for the cancellation of about £3
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• The finalsalary plans are closed to new staff
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• The Uffizi was after all originally built as offices
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• They are engaged in a bitter scrap over Stonehenge
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• Police will work a total of 14000 shifts during the visit
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• The policy is that train operating companies are private companies
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• too. And a snatch from my particular favourite
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