Businessmen are from Mars, politicians Venus, but they must learn how to speak to each other

It may sometimes feel like politicians and businesspeople are from different worlds, but if they learn to speak they will see they want the same things, writes Emma Revell

Have you ever opened a newspaper and asked yourself what on earth is going on? Why politicians seem hell-bent on making your life more difficult by introducing yet more new rules and regulations to decipher?Whether the regulators who deal with your sector have ever actually met anyone who works there? Why is it that the latest great idea isn’t actually the silver bullet they think it is – and it would only take you five minutes to explain to them exactly why, if only they’d listen?

One of the biggest hurdles we face as a country is a fundamental misunderstanding between the people who make the money and the people who make the rules.

The former, businesses large and small, resent interference in their operations. The latter, our politicians, are understandably reluctant to acknowledge that so much of what they are judged on – job security, economic growth, the wealth of the nation – depends not on what they themselves do, but on whether or not businesses deliver. The metrics of success are, for anything outside of the public sector, ultimately out of politicians’ hands.

Of course you get individuals who cross over from one world into another. Many MPs, prior to entering parliament, were involved in the world of commerce. Some founded businesses which made them rich. Others occupied senior positions in, or even sat on the boards of, leading FTSE 100 companies.

But more often than not, politicians and business leaders are speaking totally different languages. Both want growth – for the country and for themselves – but disagree on how to get it. A minister may be critical of a business they believe is dragging its feet on implementing a net zero friendly policy just as that business owner is pulling their hair out trying to work out how to decarbonise their supply chain without driving up costs for consumers and undermining their profit margins.

Failure to communicate and align on policy is causing significant damage to the British economy. Our prosperity depends on being open to talent and investment, with the right incentives and infrastructure to help retain it, but there is a widespread belief that the direction of travel in recent years has been negative. Without fixing that problem, the economy will continue to languish, stuck in a low-productivity, low-growth, high-tax trap.

In 2022, the Centre for Policy Studies interviewed more than 100 senior business figures to get their perspective on how attractive Britain was to investors. Two comments particularly stood out: that communicating with the government was difficult, because businesses did not know who to talk to and because of a lack of joined-up thinking between different departments; and that businesses were disappointed in how few politicians are willing to speak up for the businesspeople.

So what can you, as just a small part of a wider industry, do to help answer the questions I opened with? How can you begin to understand the behaviours and motivations of the so similar yet also rather different people working in Westminster and Whitehall?

Enter the Thatcher Fellowship, a new initiative from the think tank founded by the Iron Lady herself. The year-long programme is designed to introduce the sharpest young minds from business and the City to the intellectual, academic and political arguments for free markets, and give them an understanding of how Westminster really works. Our first cohort of Thatcher Fellows will join us for monthly events, dinners and gatherings to meet the UK’s leading thinkers, politicians and academics, and learn how the political world actually functions – or sometimes doesn’t function.

Our aim is not to groom the next generation of election candidates or political leaders – there are plenty of other programmes for that. Free marketeers know that as much as politicians like to boast about how many jobs have been created or how much wealth has been generated, the hard work is done by business. All politicians can do is try to create an environment that allows them to get on with it.

Through the Thatcher Fellowship, we want to ensure that the early and mid-career professionals who will rise to become tomorrow’s business leaders have the experience, knowledge and networks to work with politicians and ensure Britain has the competitive tax system, labour market and regulatory systems it needs to succeed.