If the CBI is off the pitch, hand the captain’s armband to the British Chambers of Commerce
I t wasn’t a grab for power, or even a declaration that the CBI was incapable of being reinvented. Instead, Martha Lane Fox, one-time co-founder of Lastminute.com, merely reminded the world that other business organisations exist – such as the one she heads.
“Speaking as the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, there are phenomenally strong business networks that can do the job of working together and representing themselves into government,” she said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this week.
It’s a fair point. While the CBI has been the loudest and best-resourced “voice of business” for a very long time, it’s not the only show in town. For good measure, Lane Fox took a polite pop at the narrative – promoted a few times in recent days by former CBI heavyweights – that the furlough scheme during the pandemic was cooked up by the CBI and the TUC in partnership with the Treasury. Others also laboured, she pointed out, such as BCC staffers working 16-hour days.
It’s her job to big up her organisation, of course, and, since the business world is meant to be competitive, one would be disappointed if somebody wasn’t itching to fill the lobbying void, either temporarily or permanently. But Lane Fox makes a decent argument about BCC’s credentials and access to Westminster and Whitehall. The body may sometimes be perceived as the CBI’s sleepy cousin, but it has been around for 160 years.
Consider two alternative scripts. The first is the “reimagining” of the CBI as a slimmed-down, reformed body along the lines intended by its president, Brian McBride and Rain Newton-Smith, who took up her post as its new director general on Wednesday. The problem with that plan is that even McBride concedes the CBI may not survive and
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