We need businesses to thrive for a resilient economy. So why are we shooting ourselves in the foot?

Society vilifies big business owners and bankers, but we need more of them

More needs to be done to ensure wealthy people are made to feel welcome and less isolated (Getty)

A friend of mine owns a football club. He rescued it from near-bankruptcy and has pumped in a substantial sum to keep it afloat.

He’s wealthy, self-made, an entrepreneur who has done very well in tech. He employs lots of people, and continues to invest heavily in his businesses, in a constant and growing battle with competitors from all over the world.

The football club’s stadium is run-down. He will happily build a new ground which can be turned over most of the time to community use, in an area where such facilities are lacking. He believes it only right, though, that the local council helps with the cost and smooths over the planning process. But the councillors refuse to pay, maintaining that he’s rich and he can afford it.

Meanwhile, in an effort to placate the fans and herald a fresh, transparent era, he started holding open meetings. As the team’s performances have slumped, the supporters have turned the sessions into a series of accusations based on his apparent lack of spending on players. Their attitude? He’s rich and he can afford it.

I tell this tale, not to evoke sympathy for my pal – he was heavily warned what he was getting into – but as an everyday illustration of an all-pervasive, something-for-nothing culture, a mindset that persists as we confront, let alone embrace, the tidal waves of globalisation, new technology and mass migration.

The buzzword for the economy is “growth”. But do we know what that entails?

Take my football club mate. Nowhere is there any appreciation for what he’s achieved, for the risks he’s taken and taking. Nowhere is there any sense of anyone encouraging him, making it easier for him to pump his money in. Not once does anybody say we need more like him.

It’s the case elsewhere. The people who run our big businesses live in fear of their reputations being trashed, of being tarnished as the next bankers (the rest of the world has moved on from the banking crisis, we remain firmly stuck). Instead of celebrating world-beaters in big pharma, telecoms, retailing and energy, we’re in danger of vilifying them.

Likewise, plenty is being said and written about how the UK intends to lead Europe in digital, how we’ll be the regional epicentre for online innovation, creating and nurturing market disruptors.

Talk to any tech startup when they reach a certain scale, however, and they will paint a different picture. They can’t get the funding they require to take them to the next level, they struggle to recruit people with the skills they need, they have to go through a myriad of formal procedure and regulation. Worse, the established markets they’re threatening to transform, and the system that has propped up those markets for years, are doing their utmost to deny them.

Seemingly, the Mayor of London is now in dialogue with Uber, but only after the new taxi provider received notice its licence would be withdrawn, and 40,000 drivers were left fearing for their futures.

The other evening, we were at a dinner party in a part of London where black cabs are scarce. When we came to leave we could have chosen public transport, which would have taken an hour, or phoned for a mini-cab that would have asked us to wait. Uber was there in less than two minutes and we were home in 15.

If Transport for London gets it way, Uber will no longer be an option. That’s the identical TfL which runs the public network that would have taken an hour.

We say we want new ideas, new businesses, new employers, new wealth generators. Then we do our utmost to make it as difficult and as unwelcoming as possible.

So we say we’re improving our infrastructure, but we’re still arguing over a new runway at Heathrow first mooted in June 2001. It’s not a one-off – as the late Irvine Sellar liked to point out, it took him 14 years to build The Shard.

Similarly, a foreign, state-owned behemoth of an oil supplier would like to make London one of the locations for its stock market listing – a signal if ever there was one, of the City’s abiding prestige. As a sign as to how much we’d like the share offering, we say we’ll bend our rules to accommodate them. The amendment applies only to sovereign companies – in other words, the ones that are backed by their state owners and are unlikely ever to default.

No matter about the relative lack of danger. All hell breaks loose, with City institutions and fund managers saying it must not happen, that a terrible precedent is being set, that London’s much-cherished reputation for probity will be shattered.

Now, we’re transmitting another message internationally, one that sees a Union flag being hoisted high over an island in the middle of a threatening sea. For if we’re not careful, that’s what we’ll become. A larger and more crowded version of Rockall: isolated, proud, defiant, and without relevance to anything.

Fortunately, not everyone with power is so minded. Some are more enlightened than others, but you have to know who they are and which buttons to press. In the same way we need more like my football club-owning friend, we urgently need more of them.

Chris Blackhurst is a former editor of ‘The Independent’, and executive director of C|T|F Partners, the campaigns and strategic communications advisory firm