Business executives would be forgiven for feeling intensely frustrated by their treatment by the two main political parties. Labour finally seems to have become alarmed by business fury about overregulation, with the Prime Minister pledging yesterday to cut red tape by 25 per cent, a promise that strains credulity after nine years of presiding over creeping complexity and a panoply of taxes and regulations. The Conservatives, meanwhile, sometimes give the impression that wealth creation comes so far down their list that it now ranks below “P” for poverty and “S” for social enterprise and the “T” for theatre.
David Cameron’s decision not to attend the first CBI conference since he became Conservative leader has been spun in some quarters as a calculated snub. It is unlikely that it was intended as such, nor would it be taken personally by Richard Lambert, the CBI’s new Director-General. But it was badly handled, with Mr Cameron pulling out after having accepted the invitation. It also reflects that wooing business is one of the last things currently on Mr Cameron’s mind. His priority is fashioning a new image for his party, countering focus group evidence that many voters are still suspicious of a party they associate with “fat cats”. Hence the emphasis placed by the Conservative press office on remarks about the environment, flexible working and social responsibility scattered through the speech given by George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, in Mr Cameron’s stead.
Mr Osborne is an able exponent of the case for free markets, globalisation and radically simplified tax regimes. “Without a strong free economy”, he said yesterday, “little else can be achieved.” But he should not forget how often the country has heard similar rhetoric from a Chancellor who has a very mixed record on competitiveness. The new Conservatives should not blithely assume that the business lobby somehow “knows” that the Tories’ fundamental instincts are still in the right place, when those instincts are so hedged about.
It is not necessarily contradictory to champion free markets and argue for a carbon levy: Mr Osborne suggested yesterday, in proposing his new carbon levy, that the CBI’s own surveys show that businesses would prefer taxes on pollution to taxes on profits. But the argument is a stretch, and one that understandably makes many business leaders nervous.
Mr Cameron has defended capitalism, most notably in a speech last November. Yet he received much greater coverage for his bizarre attack on WH Smith for selling chocolate oranges at the checkout. This no doubt delighted his strategists, whose message to the public is that Conservatives are prepared to stand up to big business. But chocolate oranges were a ludicrous, nannyish target. Had the party chosen to criticise excessive executive pay rises in under-performing companies, it would have won plaudits from both the public and well-managed businesses.
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With the CBI cautioning that some British companies may relocate because of a harsh tax regime, and the Open Europe think-tank yesterday calculating that EU directives on financial services could cost the economy up to £23 billion, Britain needs the Opposition to stand up more forcefully for the social value of business. It should not be impossible for Conservatives to state more clearly, without a host of mealy-mouthed parentheses, that jobs, prosperity, free trade and individual choice are worthy causes.