JIM RATCLIFFE

Unions do have a proper role in negotiating for employees and advising employees, but they have to engage with the employer.

Germany has great skill levels, great infrastructure, high-quality plant. If you go to the U.K., we're very creative, and we've got the language, but energy costs are pretty much the most expensive in the Western world; pensions are pretty expensive, and the skills are significantly below those in Germany and the U.S.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

If it's hemorrhaging cash, you've got to do something about it. You can't live with your head in the sand.

There's no substitute for seeing firsthand a well being drilled.

Shale is one answer to the U.K.'s energy problem, and it has obviously worked extraordinarily well in America.

The U.K. is already disadvantaged on the wholesale cost of energy, and then it puts taxes on it. Anybody who's an energy user is just going to disappear.

If you have spent your life building Ineos, and you find yourself in a crisis, you are going to do anything you can to save what you have been building.

Towards the end of 2005, Ineos acquired Innovene, the petrochemicals arm of BP, for $9 billion. It quadrupled the size of Ineos overnight and brought with it some of the world's largest industrial sites.

Unions can play a valuable role in large organisations where it is difficult to talk to a thousand people. They can negotiate annual pay awards with management, represent grievance cases, and explain and advise on complicated changes in employment or pension law.

The U.K. is one of the few places in the world that has final salary pensions.

Do your analysis of energy costs. Either it comes from windmills and solar or things like nuclear and shale gas. You have to think about how you provide competitive energy for U.K. Ltd.

We believe Ineos is a refreshing place to work. We believe strongly in employee share ownership.

I'm very cheerful about coming back to the U.K. We increasingly found ourselves gravitating towards London. There was so much going on for our business, and we had grown substantially here.

America's got quite reasonable tax rates from an employee point of view.

What we want to see is a long term future for Grangemouth.

Gas is by far and away the most important element of our energy policy.

It is not necessary, nor appropriate, to sow dissent and misrepresent employees or constantly to threaten industrial action.

You can't have an energy policy that means you can only have a bath when the wind blows.

If you go to the U.S., you've got a huge market, cheap energy, good skills, and pensions are a sensible cost.

Growing Ineos has been a lot of fun.

It's always been hard work for us to manufacture in the U.K. It's not a particularly profitable place for us.

Ineos is a friendly organisation. Very few people leave. It's collegiate. There's not much politics, and we like decent people. We don't like arrogance or bullies.

I think the U.K. would be perfectly successful as a standalone country, part of the European marketplace like Norway and Switzerland but without the expensive E.U. bureaucracy.

Brussels has become inefficient and very bureaucratic, which makes it slow to do things. The concept of the United States of Europe will never work.