Douglas Carswell

The CBI doesn't lobby for business - it lobbies for lobbyists

The corporatists at the CBI are inexplicably surprised that Comrade Corbyn doesn't want to meet them next week. If I were in his sandals, I wouldn't go either.

The pretence that the corporatist clique that calls itself the Confederation of British Industry represents British business is wrong. I wonder if perhaps the CBI should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act?

The CBI in my view represents not free-market capitalism, but crony corporatism. It seems to favour more regulation, higher subsidies, and bigger Government. If I am not mistaken, the CBI supported a prices-and-incomes policy in the 1970s, the ERM in the 1980s, and joining the Euro in the 1990s. In other words, they have a history of getting things seriously wrong.

I wonder if the CBI really represents those that produce and sell things in the companies that back it. I recall once attending a so-called business visit to Brussels some years ago. Many of the firms on the trip were household names.

"Yippee!" I thought. "I would get a real insight into what the wealth producers thought".

How wrong I was. It turned out that virtually all the representatives of all the big businesses on the trip were in fact from their Corporate Affairs departments. In other words, they were in-house lobbyists. They spent all the time chatting about who was being hired by which PR firm, and who was who in lobbying.

Perhaps it's much the same in terms of those who represent big firms at the CBI? Maybe they too come from the Corporate Affairs side of the business too? I think we can all see why lobbyists love Brussels. It's made for and by people like them.

Maybe that's why the CBI commissioned such a questionable poll on business attitudes to EU membership? Even the British Polling Council seems to have acknowledged that there is some doubt about the poll's methodology. All a bit Volkswagen, perhaps?

When the CBI tells us what business thinks it is really telling us what it thinks. And it is not quite the same thing a business.

I'm with Comrade Corbyn on this. If the CBI ever invited me to address them, I think I'd say a polite "no", too.

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