General Election 2015: Why my vote will go to the political party that engages the most with business

We now find ourselves in 2015 and just four months away from the next General Election that will determine who will be governing the country for the next five years (or, perhaps, which party will get the first chance to try and put a coalition together). 

The main political parties have already started their campaigning, sloganeering and political rhetoric, and some of it is really quite concerning. 

David Cameron has already committed the country to an in/out referendum on Europe, one of business’s most important trading markets, if the Conservatives win an overall majority (apparently only a 16% chance of this). Furthermore, his “Red lights flashing on the dashboard of the global economy” comments aren’t very helpful if his main purpose is to frighten the focus of the electorate on to the economy (and away from the NHS) – business is all about confidence, and when that goes then the hatches get battened down, CapEx is put on hold, bank lending dries up (not that we have seen a deluge in recent years anyway), and many business lock down into ‘wait and see’ and ‘survival’ mode. It can take some time to turn this around and see any tangible benefits. 

As bad as that seems, we then have Ed Miliband and his left leaning ideology of wealth (re)distribution and his hankering to meddle in business. So far, he has suggested freezing energy prices by the big 6 firms for two years whilst making no provision as to what their supply chain might do to them in the meantime (there’ll be no investment in energy infrastructure, that’s for sure). Construction companies can expect to have to sell their land-banks in double-quick time if they don’t get a move on and start building on them. Landlords will be in for a hard time if they want to put rents up after Labour have come to power, banks will see another swingeing tax placed on them, and for the rest of the country the 50% top/top rate of tax (yes, we have an extra tier of top rate tax since Gordon Brown’s poison pill on his way out of Downing Street which rarely gets mentioned) will return to the UK (probably without increasing the tax take; in fact statistics show that it may even reduce it).  

UKIP want the UK to leave Europe, but haven’t really produced much of tangible note regarding business so far, and the Liberal Democrats appear to want to be Kingmaker and cling on to power again (but may end up smaller than UKIP, the SNP and even the Greens). If the SNP all but wipe Labour out in Scotland, but then join a Westminster coalition with Labour, there will certainly be mutterings of constitutional issues and a destabilising effect that may result in another general election before the year is out (which will certainly add to instability in the markets). 

In recent times, it has seemed like the political goal of all parties to take as many people out of income tax at the lower end of earnings as possible, and in many ways this is an admirable thing to do (although the jobs tax of National Insurance constantly remains). However, with the top 1% of earners now paying 30% of all income tax, and with the treasury not able to significantly reduce the deficit due to the reducing amount of tax receipts taken, we could be heading for serious trouble. And if the tax and spend party return to power, that could get much worse as the public sector swells and bloats once more (and it has even been mooted that the 20% and 40% tax bands may have to go up if this scenario plays out). 

Taking things back to the basics that Lord Digby Jones so rightly included within his Fixing Britain book, it is business that creates employment. Investment and entrepreneurship, in the wrapper of a trading organisation, creates jobs. Jobs require staff who then get paid but also contribute to the country via direct and indirect taxes. Without these taxes there would be no public sector; no nurses, no doctors, no police service, no fire service, no army/navy/RAF and no civil servants (as the government would have no money to spend). 

Private sector business plays an important part in the UK economy, so it is incredibly disappointing to see business people vilified as ‘fat cats’ and the like when it is these very people who put up and risk their own money (and houses) to pursue an idea that may crash and burn, but also might just succeed and grow and create significant employment (and tax receipts) in the meantime. 

I know that it is near on impossible to stop a politician from saying the things that they believe you want to hear, which they constantly do in an attempt to win votes and achieve their short-term goal of power. But for once it would be encouraging, in the run up to a general election, for a political party to acknowledge the importance of the Private sector to the UK economy and treat the business community more like a valued partner than a pariah. And if one of the political parties is able to do that, then they can certainly count on my vote.