If I were the CEO of UK Plc, I ‘d be slamming the panic button right now

How to heal our country? Start treating it like a privately owned company, says Charles White-Thomson

At the annual Ayn Rand lecture yesterday evening in Drapers’ Hall, at which I gave the keynote lecture about the ‘importance of national honesty,’ one individual asked me perhaps the most pertinent question of the evening: how can we incentivise – or even demand – national honesty from our leaders?

After all, it’s high time our politicians started, as the kids now apparently say, to get real. Our debt stands at £2.7 trillion. Our tax burden is at a 70 year high, but over 80 per cent of us think that Britain’s public services are in a bad state. Our GDP growth has been, at best, anaemic. 

Despite this, we are continuing to saddle ourselves with huge spending commitments – according to the ONS, the government’s pension liabilities, for example, were £6.4 trillion in 2018.

To make matters worse, we are now actively chasing wealth creators, who pay a significant percentage of the UK’s tax intake, and whose investments are vital to the UK economy, out of the country. According to the Adam Smith Institute, we are set to lose the greatest proportion – a whopping 20 per cent – of millionaires in the world over the course of this parliament. 

So let’s be frank, if the UK were a publicly listed company, and if I, or, I suspect, any reader of City AM, were the CEO, I’d be slamming the panic button and demanding a root-and-branch review. I’d want to know why there’s so much internal division, and why we’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to persuade others to invest in us. And I’d be trying to get to the bottom of who is responsible. 

Sadly, accountability seems to matter far less in politics. Our system, in the short-term, favours ‘easy’ answers, rather than frank discussions with the public about which policies will get the country back on its feet. The threat of wealth taxes, which is more likely to cost, rather than raise, money is a case in point. 

Unlike CFOs and CEOs, ministers are rarely fired for failing to meet their targets. As Rand herself once said: “If a business makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.”

That’s why I think the answer to the question of how we incentivise ‘national honesty’ is to start treating the UK like a private company – UK plc if you like. The government should share a detailed line-by-line growth plan, and apply public sector rigour to deliver on it. This means that the government should operate on yearly targets, rather than a vague five-year plan to match election cycles.

We also need to get more of those with private-sector experience involved in politics. Last night, I spoke about my concern that we are limiting the ability of people with certain backgrounds to climb the corporate ladder. I am not sure I would be where I am today if I had to go through today’s screening process, with its insistence on degrees from Russell Group universities. 

The same is true of government roles – more of them should be filled by those who have worked in business, rather than this current reliance on individuals who have been involved in only politics for their whole lives.

The stakes are high. Those who have read Rand’s The Fountainhead will recognise how dishonesty and groupthink can stifle visionary heroism, leading to decline and stasis. But for years, robust individuals and teams have turned around businesses which were on the rocks and made them some of the most successful in the world. There is no reason why we cannot do the same with the UK.