Business interests writing policy are not doing you a favour

The infiltration of government by commercial interests is one of the most established forms of corruption in this country, and yet it is so widespread it is seldom even mentioned. A simplistic narrative has emerged around business interests which are these days completely falsely take to represent the public interest in and of themselves.

So when The National reports that lobbyists are taking the place of neutral civil servants and actually writing Treasury policy, few even blink these days. The benefit of the integration of business interests into the heart of politics is the basis of a cross-party consensus these days.

This is the result of a campaign which has now been running for so long that politicians fail to see it, a campaign to depoliticise business interests. When politicians refer to 'technocratic government' they generally assume that means 'working to an agenda sympathetic to financial and business interests'. There are no examples of poverty- or climate-orientated technocratic governments.

This depoliticisation of business is based on the myth of the wealth-creator: that uniquely among citizens of nations, it is only business leaders and entrepreneurs who create wealth. The entire wealth of a nation, enormous amounts of it solely based on the inherent assets of the nation or the basic consumption of its citizens.

The wealth in food production is demand-driven – it is a human necessity that we eat and is not the result of entrepreneurial activity. Likewise, energy production is demand-driven, as is the health economy, the transport economy, the housing economy and so on. These exist not because a business leader invented them but because they are fundamental requirements of society.

Probably about 70 per cent of western economies are this kind of routine human need-driven consumption and the role of business in this is not to create wealth but to decide who gets the profits. Even in traditional economic theory, wealth is created through the application of labour to capital. It was never capital alone which created wealth.

That of course has change with the rentier economy where purely financial power is used to gouge even more wealth out of the population to be transferred to the very wealthy, but these are in reality wealth-destroying industries which inhibit others from creating wealth for themselves by taking it from them.

For example, high housing costs harm worker mobility which harms the economy, and monopoly distribution systems prevent innovative new entries to the market from competing with established businesses who are therefore actively inhibiting new economy development.

None of this is ever the topic of political debate however. 'Business' is treated as a synonym for 'good' and so business interests are not treated in the same way as other lobbying requests. To be very clear about it, City of London lobbyists (among the least public-good of all industries) are not being seconded to Treasury along with poverty campaigners and Just Stop Oil.

This practice developed in Westminster but in many ways Scotland has perfected it. As well as secondments in to government, in Scotland the civil service at times seems to have merged with external business interests and in particular the Big Four accounting firms who primarily represent the interests of big business and have been repeatedly fined for biased action favouring their big business clients.

Common Weal has repeatedly called for this practice to be ended. There should be no privileged sectoral access to policy making and no sector of the economy should get unique access to insider knowledge. This is absolutely nothing to do with sharing 'business experience' with policy-makers, it is simply an outrageously biased means of forming policy.

Common Weal has set out a full model for an independent but responsive policy-making structure which brings in external ideas and expertise in a balance, transparent and public-good orientated manner. It revolves around Policy Academies (centres of excellence of thinking where a wide range of expertise is drawn on) and a Civic Forum (where the full range of civil voices can input policy ideas and not just those that spend most on lobbying).

There needs to be reform of who gets undue access to government. You can read more about our plans for democratic policy making in Sorted.