Tag Archives: business policy

The business sections of newspapers often take a different angle on British politics than their earlier pages. While Matt Chorley was promoting Ed Davey in Saturday’s Times in order to make fun of Keir Starmer, Ian King, the business editor of Sky News, was writing about why business representatives and corporate lobbyists should be taking the Liberal Democrats more seriously, and making contact with party policy-makers. He suggests that larger numbers of them will be coming to the Brighton conference, since opinion polls persist in suggesting that the next election will not produce a majority for any single party, leaving the Liberal Democrats in a position to influence whatever government emerges.

If business is already talking about this, we had better put in some careful thinking ourselves. Our record on preparing for the possibility of conversations with other parties is mixed. A week before the 1979 general election, when it still looked possible that the Conservatives might not gain an overall majority, I was authorised (as the lead on our manifesto team) to contact my Tory opposite number, and discovered he was far better prepared than anyone of us.. In 1996-7, in contrast, we conducted extensive private consultations with Labour, only to be overtaken by the scale of the swing to Labour. In 2009-10 there was vigorous resistance by some MPs and activists to contemplating the hard choices that negotiating with another party about priorities would bring. I recall repeated Federal Policy Committee meetings at which attempts were made to shape our policy on student fees so that it would be defensible if we found ourselves in government, resisted by enthusiastic campaigners who insisted that it was a vote-winner.

Another recent Times business article, sharply critical of the fantasies floated in the Tory leadership campaign, wrote of the difference between ‘campaign economics’ and ‘government economics’, and the need to ensure that campaign promises do not make choices in government too difficult. Economic and political choices after the next election are likely to be fraught. We will need to have some clear and simple priorities, first for the campaign and then for any negotiations that might follow.