There are plenty of reasons to believe that Nigel Farage’s party have fallen foul of conflating being pro-business with-pro enterprise. Whether it’s deputy leader Richard Tice’s promise to “wage war” and use “every lever” to block energy projects that he disagrees with, or on-again, off-again party chairman Zia Yusuf’s Britannia Card scheme, there is a lot of evidence that while the party knows what businesses it likes and which it doesn’t, it is not necessarily as focussed on the competitive enterprise environment needed to generate real growth and prosperity. This can in a large part be attributed to Reform’s Successful Businessmen problem — something it must address as it moves closer to power.
On the face of it, a political party being controlled to a large degree by successful businessmen is a nice problem to have. The benefits are pretty obvious and tick all the crap HR-speak boxes on LinkedIn: proven track record in a management position, skilled at managing complex stakeholder requirements, high level of communications skills, experience of working in a highly regulated environment, shareholder engagement. There’s also the straightforward vicarious reputational benefits of being associated with winners from outside of politics.
It certainly appears to be a situation that Reform are happy to find themselves in. Though Nigel Farage is the only real household name in the party, Reform policy announcements are dominated by Zia Yusuf and by Richard Tice. While Yusuf is not yet an MP, recent manoeuvrings suggest he would very much like to be in Parliament should a winnable by-election seat open up, and along with Tice he has taken ownership of any policies that might in any way be construed as interacting with “business”. That is appealing to Reform as an idea since they are both in their own way Successful Businessmen (this tweet from Zia insinuates that this is something of a prerequisite to understand tax policy, though more on that later), and they have a support base of a lot of voters that would agree with the idea that “government should be run like a business”.
The idea of government being managed like a business is a common trope around centre-right circles. It’s one of those things that I think people often repeat at gala dinners and suchlike, without thinking through what it entails. Yes, it superficially suggests a hard-nosed government devoted to the bottom line and to valuing taxpayers as stakeholders, but the other side of the coin (or banknote) is a drive to expand into new markets and to use a dominant position to increase market share and beggar competitors.
This strikes at the heart of the problematic approach to policymaking that Reform has flirted with.
As Milton Friedman put it:
You must separate out being “pro free-enterprise” from being “pro-business” … almost every businessman is in favour of free enterprise for everybody else, but special privilege and special government protection for himself. As a result, they have been a major force in undermining the free enterprise system. Stop kidding yourself into thinking you can use the business community as a way to promote free enterprise. Unfortunately, most of them are not our friends in that respect.
This is not a singling out Reform out of party political loyalties, but because they are more susceptible to being captured by narrow interests than other parties for a few reasons, not least that with only five MPs it doesn’t take much for a dominant ideology and vision to take hold. There is also the case that Reform are a challenger party and cannot yet attract candidates from white collar professions in the way the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems can. (Rupert Lowe’s bizarre exile cannot have made this easier.)
Richard Tice is a former CEO of a property asset management group and Zia Yusuf was the co-founder of a luxury concierge company, Velocity Black, sold to Capital One in 2023. Both are multimillionaires, and do not have to fear for their careers supporting a sometimes controversial party.
Both men have thrived in some way thanks to an ability to navigate a regulatory environment that has hindered their competitors
That wealth has not come from chance, but from hard work and intelligence, favourable capital conditions and stable property rights. But whether they care to admit it or not, both men have thrived in some way thanks to an ability to navigate a regulatory environment that has hindered their competitors. In Tice’s case, success has been a function of the ability to operate within Britain’s onerous planning system, where competitors have struggled or failed. The nature of Zia Yusuf’s business success is perhaps even more relevant, with his concierge service existing precisely because it thrived on scarcity.
It is likely that both Tice and Yusuf see themselves as having been successful thanks to something innate, and that the fittest survived. Good for them. This is absolutely not an anti-business diatribe, but rather a concern over the conflicted position of the businessman as policymaker. The attributes that allowed them to be successful in business are a force for good, but their reflex to recreate the business conditions that gave them that success come with a huge blind spot towards the importance of competition and the need to allow new entrants to flourish in the marketplace, as well as a low prioritisation of salary growth. It also fosters a top-down approach well demonstrated by Yusuf’s non-dom proposals.
Anybody that has ever worked in an SME will be familiar with The Owner Has Had A Big Idea. Big Ideas come from a variety of places — they can appear from the heavens during the owner’s dog walk. They can be introduced when the business owner meets Somebody Brilliant during a dinner. They can be germinated when the owner needs a third book to make up the Waterstones 3-for-2 deal in an airport lounge and selects a book at random from the business section. The Owner Has Had A Big Ideas override all other business, and skip the kind of due diligence and planning that would form the usual day-to-day running of the core business functions. Most of the time, the owner has already taken measures to expedite the implementation of The Big Idea before the company has even received the diary invite summoning them to the meeting to discuss it (abolishing chairs from the office, selling his wife’s craft jam in the reception area of the financial services company, whatever).
The planning, consultation, and delivery of Reform’s Britannia Card scheme certainly had something of The Owner Has Had A Big Idea about it. Speaking last week, Reform presented plans to allow wealthy migrants to buy a 10-year residency permit for £250,000 which would exempt them from UK tax on their overseas income, assets and capital gains. But the Big Idea kicker is the proposal of a wealth redistributionist policy of the £250k payments redistributed as a cash payment to the approximately 2.5 million workers earning a full-time salary of less than £23,000.
The scheme’s goal is sensible — stymying or even reversing the exodus of high net worth individuals from Britain. But the scheme itself came across as shot through with holes and assumptions, which I think are well addressed here by Dan Neidle. Essentially, it would result in a large windfall gain for a small number of people for whom the £250,000 was a bargain entry fee, it would deter those for whom it wasn’t, it would provide a large tax cut to those already intending to stay in the UK anyway, and the instability of the scheme would make a bet on it surviving its promised 10 year lifespan an unattractive one, due to no Parliament being able to bind its successors into being unable to scrap the scheme. All of which point to some fairly rash assumptions about the feasibility of the redistributionist aims of the scheme.
In the context of Reform policymaking ethos, it is perhaps not as much the tax raising potential of the scheme that matters. Rather, it says a lot about their philosophy for success. I believe that Zia Yusuf sincerely wants to see a prosperous Britain, but in his mind’s eye, a prosperous Britain would be one with a thousand Zia Yusufs. Instead, Reform should resist the urge to try to pick business winners and losers. They should also grow out of the urge to throw untested ideas into the open. It was an acceptable practice in the past, but if they are serious about being a party of government, they should show that they are able to promote policies on which business creators can base long-term plans. Reform should above all keep things simple and choose liberty at every turn — maximise market freedom, low regulation, remove artificial barriers of entry to competition, and encourage stable laws protecting property rights. It won’t conjure up UK resident billionaires overnight by Big Idea policy announcements, but it will unleash Britain’s ability to make itself prosperous.
