Author Archives: Guy Benson

The next election gives us a real opportunity. Brexit is shattering traditional party loyalties and both tired, old-parties are rapidly shifting towards polarising extremes, alienating swathes of their traditional support base.  

Given this, the Liberal Democrats are increasingly able to offer a political lifeboat to those who believe in sensible and evidence-based, rather than ideological-based policies.

One group that is ripe for the taking in the current climate, is the business community. 

Traditionally, business has strongly supported the Conservatives. However Brexit, combined with the lurch to the right of the Conservatives under Boris Johnson, means increasingly business feels alienated from what once they may have considered their “natural home”. 

It’s not all about Brexit either, with the divergent views of business over their support for HS2 and opposition to discriminatory migration proposals, it is clear there is a growing rift between the current Conservative leadership and the business community. This, combined with our pro-EU, internationalist outlook, means that businesses alignment with our policy goals and values is much more of a natural fit than continued alignment with an increasingly isolationist Conservative Party. 

Under Jeremy Corbyn, with policies that resemble a 1970’s socialist, the Labour Party cannot and will not offer any form of a home for business. Indeed, at a business industry fringe at their conference in Brighton, it took Corbyn twenty minutes of his speech, before he even mentioned the word “business”. The current Shadow Business Secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, does not perform much better, and appears unreceptive to the idea that business and the private-sector must be part of the solution and not simply a problem. Given this, it seems likely that allies that Labour may once have had in business and industry, are likely to be dropping away even more rapidly than their Conservative counterparts.