Britain keeps arguing about taxes, spending and ideology. But we’re asking the wrong question. The real question isn’t which party governs. It’s who governs. Our biggest leadership problem isn’t intelligence or effort. It’s experience.
Too many of the people making decisions about Britain’s economy have never actually participated in building one.
Westminster has become dominated by career politicians; people who understand campaigns, parliament and policy but have never started a business, hired staff, met payroll, raised investment, sold to customers, managed cash flow or carried genuine commercial risk.
In every other profession this would be absurd. No board appoints a finance director who has never managed finance. No hospital asks someone without clinical experience to lead medicine. No technology company hands responsibility for growth to someone who has never built or scaled a business. Yet government routinely appoints ministers to sectors they have never worked in and industries they barely understand, then seems surprised when policy misses the mark.
The problem runs deeper than experience. Politics rewards process. Business rewards outcomes. In business, if you consistently make poor decisions, you lose customers, investors, market share, or your company disappears. Failure has consequences. Success is rewarded.
Government operates differently. Across Westminster, Whitehall, government agencies and many publicly funded bodies, accountability is weak. Delivery is rarely measured properly, ownership is often blurred and failure seldom carries meaningful consequences. Instead, politicians become managers of bureaucracy rather than leaders solving problems.
If Britain were assembling its Cabinet from scratch today, would it really recruit almost exclusively from professional politics? Or would it deliberately seek entrepreneurs, founders, engineers, scientists, manufacturers, investors, healthcare leaders and technologists alongside experienced politicians?
Too much legislation exists simply because government believes governing means producing more of it. Often this merely creates friction, slows enterprise and adds complexity without improving outcomes. Ministers are policymakers, not technical specialists. But practical judgement matters hugely.
How do you understand the cumulative impact of regulation if you’ve never had to comply with it? How do you understand the effect of employment law if you’ve never employed anyone? How do you design investment policy if you’ve never persuaded someone to risk their own capital?
Experience doesn’t guarantee good decisions. But a complete absence of relevant experience must raise serious questions.
If Britain were assembling its Cabinet from scratch today, would it really recruit almost exclusively from professional politics? Or would it deliberately seek entrepreneurs, founders, engineers, scientists, manufacturers, investors, healthcare leaders and technologists alongside experienced politicians?
…There is virtually no meaningful commercial experience around the Cabinet table.
The evidence suggests we already know the answer.
Britain’s Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, has never run a business. He understands enterprise in much the same way a theatre critic understands acting: he has observed it, commented on it and judged it, but never had to perform.
That isn’t a personal criticism. It is a criticism of a system that believes reading briefing papers is an adequate substitute for lived experience.
Andy Burnham might have more charisma than Keir Starmer, but he’s a life-long career politician. And the same pattern repeats across government. Britain’s senior leadership is overwhelmingly drawn from politics, law, public service and trade union backgrounds. There is virtually no meaningful commercial experience around the Cabinet table.
Entrepreneurs create value where none existed before. They are comfortable with uncertainty. They understand risk because they have lived it…
This isn’t fundamentally about competence. It’s about perspective. It’s about cognitive diversity. People solve problems according to the environments they’ve lived in. When almost everyone has travelled through the same institutions, surrounded by people with similar incentives and similar experiences, they inevitably approach problems in similar ways.
The result is predictable. Government defaults towards management over leadership. Process over outcomes. Risk avoidance over innovation. That is precisely why Britain needs more entrepreneurial thinking.
Entrepreneurship is not simply about starting businesses. It is the discipline of solving meaningful problems with limited resources, accepting personal accountability and constantly adapting as circumstances change.
Entrepreneurs create value where none existed before. They are comfortable with uncertainty. They understand risk because they have lived it. They make decisions with incomplete information, accept responsibility when they get them wrong and change course quickly when reality demands it. British politics desperately needs more of that mindset.
Instead, successive governments of every political colour have steadily made entrepreneurship more difficult. Higher employment costs. Increasing regulation. Constant tax changes. Endless policy uncertainty.
…Until people who have built companies, allocated capital, created jobs and carried commercial risk become central participants in government, not merely stakeholders consulted after decisions have been taken, we will continue repeating the same mistakes.
Politicians praise entrepreneurs as the engine of growth while treating them as little more than sources of tax revenue and regulatory compliance. Then they wonder why investment stalls, in both good projects and in good talent.
Constant policy changes, shifting incentives and political uncertainty quietly destroy long-term confidence. Investors don’t expect governments to predict the future. They simply expect them to stop screwing it up.
Small businesses illustrate the problem perfectly. SMEs employ the majority of Britain’s private-sector workforce, yet they still lack a permanent seat at the policy table. Tony Blair understood this better than most recent prime ministers. His government brought business leaders, industrialists and SME representatives into policymaking as permanent contributors, not simply people invited to consultations once decisions had effectively been made.
Business doesn’t experience government in departmental silos. Employment law arrives alongside tax changes. Regulation arrives alongside apprenticeships. Energy costs arrive alongside planning reform. Entrepreneurs experience the cumulative burden of government, not just individual departments.
So who inside Whitehall is responsible for asking what the combined impact looks like before another policy lands on the desk of a business owner? Who speaks for the entrepreneur before legislation is drafted rather than after the damage is done? This isn’t an argument about left versus right. It is an argument against a political class increasingly disconnected from the economy it governs.
Britain doesn’t need different policies. It needs different perspectives. Until people who have built companies, allocated capital, created jobs and carried commercial risk become central participants in government, not merely stakeholders consulted after decisions have been taken, we will continue repeating the same mistakes.
Andy Burnham has spoken about three guiding principles; place over party, problem-solving over point-scoring, and long-term thinking over short-term politics.
They’re admirable principles. But he needs a fourth. “Only get a seat once you’ve had a real job first”.
If Britain wants a government capable of building growth, the first qualification for helping run the economy should be having participated in one.
John Stapleton is an investor & Non-Executive Director, providing advice, guidance and mentoring to business owners. John is a business thought leader and delivers keynotes on a range of entrepreneurial, management and motivational leadership topics. Previously, he co-founded The New Covent Garden Soup Co Ltd and later Little Dish, both of which he exited successfully. John is also the founder of Mission Ventures (UK) and is a founding partner of The Redesdale Food Fund, based in Dublin.
