I wish David Cameron and his government would make their minds up about what they think of business. One week they endorse the stripping of titles from disgraced banking barons and allow the flames of the campaign against bonuses to spread; the next, the UK prime minister is out warning about “dangerous rhetoric” that implies “wealth creation is somehow anti-social”.
It is a bit like the club chairman showing football fans a pre-match video of heinous fouls committed by the visiting team’s players and then complaining when the same fans become abusive during the match.
Mr Cameron — and his opposite number Ed Miliband, who made a cack-handed attempt to start separating business into “good” and “bad” sectors in a speech last year — must start to realise that there is nothing to be gained by such confused debate, and much to lose.
By all means set rules and penalise infringements, on the corporate field as in the sporting arena. But the old political assumption that the interests of business and society are somehow opposed is breaking down. If political leaders continue to fight about the differences between the two, they may well impede that process.
Mr Cameron made Thursday’s speech criticising dangerous rhetoric at the Business in the Community conference. He points in the right direction, saying that “business is not just about making money… it’s also the most powerful force for social progress the world has ever known”
But even this “not only… but also” construction is looking increasingly out of date. The sorts of good works promoted by Business in the Community (whose annual awards ceremony, long backed by the FT, I attended last year) used to be regarded as separate, nice-to-have way of putting a responsible face on (presumably irresponsible) business. Now “social responsibility” is rightly being subsumed into the day-to-day strategies of big companies such as Unilever, General Electric and IBM. As I’ve pointed out before: “It’s not the weight of big companies that should mark them out as villains, but the way they throw it around.”
Organisations outside the UK, US and Europe, are coming up with “mixed-value” models of business, that yoke together public and private sector interests. Many examples are laid out in Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby’s excellent new book Standing on the Sun, which I reviewed in Thursday’s FT.
As Umair Haque put it, promoting an even more radical vision, in his recent e-book, Betterness:
“Maybe there are better kinds of companies, which can return more than just profit through better approaches to production and consumption, that can yield more meaningful, durable benefits by trading and exchanging hardier, more enduring, more fruitful kinds of capital. Maybe there’s not merely a link missing from, but a yawning gulf between, the commonly understood point of the industrial growth of output and the human growth of people.”
Meyer and Kirby express some concern in their book that ventures like India’s Dial 1298 for Ambulance — which combines a for-profit service with a non-profit foundation — would be regarded as “socialism” in the US. In Britain — where any commercialisation of the National Health Service provokes conniptions — such a public-private set-up would be more likely to be condemned for being “too capitalist”.
Hence my fear about the mixed messages coming from UK politicians. It’s up to Mr Cameron and his coalition colleagues now to follow the course he has set in Thursday’s speech. Otherwise, by keeping popular concerns about “big business” on a rolling boil, politicians will stifle genuine attempts by companies to move into new areas of productive collaboration, to the disbenefit of both the companies and the society they serve.
