by Dan Cooke

It’s a sure sign you’re in a bad way when someone as pugnacious as Lord Sugar takes care to fire you gently, stressing that they don’t want to “stick in the boot”.

In truth, it is the very blandness of Sugar’s announcement of his resignation from the Labour party that is most damning. Sugar apparently did not even feel the need to explain what were Labour’s “negative business policies and general anti-enterprise concepts” that concerned him, or how these compared with policies of Gordon Brown which he praised.  He probably thought he did not need to because the perception that the Labour party is now “anti-business” has become so wide and deep that, for many, it requires no explanation.

Whether it is actually justified or not, this is a totally untenable impression for a mainstream political party to have created in a modern capitalist society. When too many swing voters decided that a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for a strong economy, the perception that companies on which millions rely for their livelihoods were behind the Tories, reflected in high-profile open letter campaigns, will have been a major contributing factor.  It is quite plausible that this impression was even more important than the debate about the causes and consequences of the deficit, on which the party has agonised incomparably more.

How has this happened? Labour, after all, is not the party that wants to put at risk access for British businesses to the single market in Europe and the network of EU-negotiated free trade agreements outside Europe. Labour is not the party that hinders businesses obtaining crucial work permits for skilled workers because of an arbitrary and undeliverable immigration cap. And Labour is not the party that has put ideology ahead of commercial logic with unworkable schemes like the widely mocked “shares for rights” proposal.

And it is hard to believe that modest incremental reforms like raising the minimum wage or abolishing the recent innovation of zero hours contracts really struck fear into the corporate sector.

Some part of the answer may be that the Tories enjoy a built-in head-start in garnering business approval, and so are afforded greater tolerance for their own “anti-business” policies. It would be statistically highly probable that some of the most senior business leaders will be natural (and sometimes even card-carrying) Conservatives, based on their social background and remuneration alone. As a result, realistically, it will always be easier for the Tories to muster a list of CEOs to sign a supportive letter than it will be for Labour.

However, the bigger part of the answer is far more important. Business is not inherently party-political, inevitably harbours a range of views on points of policy and will not expect universal accord with any political party. Business is also subject to constant change, and new ideas on issues which Labour cares about,  like maximising productivity, incentivising investment, engaging and motivating employees, and developing workforce skills, are enthusiastically and urgently debated every day by business leaders.

Yet in recent years Labour largely ignored the opportunity for a serious dialogue on how government and business can effectively work together on these and other issues,  instead offering slogans and buzzwords, including the notorious distinction between “predators” and “producers”.  At best this created the impression that we were unserious and, at worst, that we saw business as the enemy.  Occasionally trying to pose as champions of small business was no answer to this criticism, as it merely repeated the mistake of presuming to divide business into deserving and undeserving categories based on half-baked distinctions.

In this way, through little more than a fit of absence of mind, we created a near unanimous impression we did not even care what most of the business community thought, and that its interests would probably be ignored by a Labour government.

Fortunately, as Labour’s failings in this area have been so crudely and gratuitously self-inflicted,  the way forward is not hard to identify and, with effort, progress can be almost guaranteed. Labour first needs to start talking seriously to business again, and letting it be known we are doing so: engaging with a wide range of different types of enterprises on a wide range of issues, treating those in business as grown-ups and showing that we are too. Business figures should be offered the opportunity to contribute to policy development, not as privileged arbiters of what is right but as respected stakeholders among others including the unions.

As we develop more detailed proposals on skills, tax, enterprise and the workplace we should not expect or seek unanimous approval from business, but should argue our case with humility, pragmatism and honesty when we find disagreement.  This would mean we would have a normal relationship for a mainstream political party with the business community.

This might, or might not, be a Labour party that Lord Sugar would see fit to re-join, but that doesn’t matter very much. The tendency to be star-struck by individual converts from commerce declaring for the Labour team has usually ended badly (think the far less gracious Digby Jones) and is actually part of the problem. Business isn’t looking for a teen-age crush, but a grown up relationship. If we can manage that, some tycoons might still write to the Telegraph supporting the Conservatives, but more would hold back, and Labour will not carry the millstone we had in the last election into the next.

Dan Cooke is a Labour member and business lawyer

Tags: alan sugar, Business, Dan Cooke, general election 2015, Labour defeat

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