This House Believes Corporate Responsibility is Unsustainable - Aye or Noe?

In an age where corporate responsibility is king, it had all the makings for a lively debate; an edgy title and a lineup that featured the green might of Mike Barry from M&S debating alongside Barnaby Briggs from Shell - of course, accompanied by the obligatory threat of anti-capitalist protesters. Organised by ICAEW and held at the Cambridge Union Society, the debate saw the 'aye' speakers, such as economist Sean Richard put forth a compelling barrage of cold, hard economic logic, wheeling out old favourites, including 'a business can only survive by creating wealth'. With much talk of investors, bottom lines and ROI, their economic lexicon framed 'corporate responsibility' as woollier than an M&S cardigan. The noe camp put forward an equally compelling case, with Warren East, CEO of ARM (one of the poster boys of successful British business) stating that 'responsibility is a competitive necessity of the businesses of today'. Mike Barry didn't beat around the bush either, saying 'If business sits on it's backside, we have no future: business needs to intervene'. A frank-talking Barnaby Briggs didn't shy away from speaking about Shell's turmoil in Nigeria - what he believed to be a precursor for what's to come in a resource-constrained world. Whilst he painted an emotional picture, his focus on small-scale case studies of 'responsibility' appeared to skirt around the core issue of whether extracting a non-renewable resource is fundamentally responsible, despite our dependence on it.