DOOMSAYERS pipe down. Keep the gloom to yourselves and let business in Britain do what it does best.

That is the fighting message from Stephen Kennedy, the managing director for northern Europe of CPP, one of the biggest private employers in York, which in March launched on the Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of £396 million Mr Kennedy, a former Business Personality Of The Year in The Press Business Awards, told more than 100 people at the York Professionals’ annual dinner at York Racecourse that what must be encouraged is risk-taking.

He said: “You must take risks. Risks are good. Risks are necessary.

“Yes, they must be controlled and, yes, the banks forgot that for a while, but with no risk-taking you cannot have a growing successful private sector, as opposed to what we have had, which is big government, big brother and big public-sector pension deficits.”

The tough-talking Glaswegian argued that the “demonisation” of success had been taken too far by the regulators, politicians and the media.

“Fear has overwhelmed greed, and those adventurous wealth and job creators are on the retreat. I am seeing it every day.

“Doing nothing and keeping your head down for a bit has become the order of the day for many people. ‘We will see how things go in a year or so’ has become the mantra for many. We won’t get it sorted out with that attitude. We at CPP are going for growth now, not next year,” he said.

Risk takers were being assaulted on all sides – by lack of credit, “envy taxes” and red tape, yet in the last 15 years the private sector’s gross domestic product had shrunk, net of inflation, while the public sector grew by 70 per cent.

He said it was not public servants’ fault that the economy had become dominated by Government spending and huge pension liabilities – the absolutely enormous income and expenditure gap between public and private sectors was wrong.

“Public servants have had it too good and, again, it is not their fault, but we need these people, many of them talented, back in the private sector.”

And where were these new private-sector jobs for them going to come from? “You guessed it: Risk takers taking risks and investing money.” For that reason entrepreneurs and corporate wealth creators had to be made to feel more positive about investing in the UK again, said Mr Kennedy.

He warned: “We must reverse the current negative psychology and create more of that naïve optimism and risk-taking that fires ‘startups’ and commercial breakthroughs, because if we don’t we are doomed to a world of negativity and declining living standards.”