Asking the wrong question

I’ve been disillusioned with UK political leadership for a while. What changed recently is that I got curious about it instead of just staying annoyed.

I run my own business. I spend most of my working life inside other people’s businesses too, coaching and consulting with business owners and leadership teams across sectors and sizes. For the past few years, I’ve watched the same conversation repeat itself. Policy after policy landing in ways that feel like headwinds: employment law changes, tax pressure, regulatory expansion, the general sense that running a business in Britain carries more friction than it used to.

My response, for a long time, was the same as most of my clients’. Low-level, persistent frustration. The kind that shows up in client conversations and in any room where business owners are honest about how things actually feel. Nobody had a satisfying answer for why it felt this way. They could identify what was happening. They couldn’t explain the deeper why. Neither could I.

Part of what made it hard was that the frustration kept building regardless of which party was governing. I’ve run my own business across different administrations. The specifics change. The underlying sense of rowing against a policy tide has been remarkably consistent.

Then I kept hearing the same name on the podcasts I listen to: the Fabian Society. Political podcasts. Business discussions. People are trying to make sense of the direction of UK economic policy. The name kept surfacing. I did what most people probably do: noted it, assumed it was something political commentators argue about amongst themselves, and moved on.

Then I actually read about it. Properly.

What I found was more interesting than the conspiracy narrative I’d half-expected, and more useful than the frustration I’d been carrying.

That process forced me to ask a better question. I stopped asking “who’s to blame?” and started asking “where do these ideas actually come from?”

It’s a different kind of question. It takes longer to answer. But it gives you something actually useful at the end.

What the Fabian Society is

The Fabian Society was founded in London in 1884. Its name comes from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, the commander who defeated Hannibal through patience and strategic delay rather than confrontation. The founding members deliberately chose that name. Their philosophy: lasting social change comes from gradual, incremental reform of existing institutions. Steady, patient accumulation rather than rupture.

It is formally affiliated with the Labour Party. It has around 7,000 members: politicians, academics, policy researchers, and interested members of the public. It publishes papers, runs conferences, and has operated continuously for 140 years. Everything it does is publicly available.

You will sometimes hear it described on certain podcasts as a shadowy network directing policy from behind the scenes. That framing doesn’t hold up, and it misses the more interesting part of the story.

What 140 years of patient intellectual work produce

Fabian founded the London School of Economics with the figures Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It has since educated a substantial share of the British policy establishment: civil servants, economists, ministers and their advisers. The foundational assumptions of the modern welfare state, the basic framework for what government is for and what it should do, were significantly shaped by Fabian-era thinking in the early twentieth century.

Those assumptions do not reset when a general election changes the party in Downing Street.

The people who write policy briefings, who advise ministers, who draft legislation: many of them trained in institutions that absorbed these ideas not as contested political positions but as settled professional doctrine. They didn’t consciously choose these assumptions. They inherited them. In the same way, most business leaders don’t consciously choose their assumptions about what good management looks like or how strategy should be built. Those assumptions came from wherever they were trained. Inheritance is invisible until someone points it out.

That’s true of most inherited assumptions. You can’t see the water you swim in. What shifted for me was asking the question.

This is what I mean when I say ideas outlive elections. You can vote a party out. You cannot vote out the intellectual infrastructure that shapes how the next government thinks.

To be clear: this runs across the political spectrum. Policy Exchange and the Institute of Economic Affairs have shaped Conservative and centre-right thinking in the same way for decades. Both major parties largely operate within intellectual frameworks they inherited rather than invented. Both have their own policy infrastructure. Every functioning democracy works this way.

Ideas outlive elections. That’s the thing my frustration had been stopping me from seeing.

What this probably means for your business

If the current intellectual direction holds, and there are no signs of a structural break from any major party, the trajectory over the next three to five years probably looks something like this.

Employment rights will continue to expand. Day-one protections, flexible working provisions, workers’ rights entitlements: the direction has been consistent across multiple governments. The pace varies depending on who’s in power. The direction does not. If people costs are significant in your business, this is a planning assumption worth building in now.

The tax environment for owner-managed businesses will probably tighten further. The intellectual consensus around redistribution through the tax system is durable and not dependent on any single election result. Corporate and dividend taxation, and the overall burden on smaller businesses: the direction of travel over the past decade is a more reliable guide to the next five years than whoever currently occupies Number 11.

Expectations around social value, workforce standards, and what is broadly called ESG will increase steadily rather than suddenly. The language the government uses for this shifts every few years. The underlying expectation that businesses demonstrate contribution beyond profit does not, particularly in public procurement and regulated markets. Businesses that can clearly articulate their social contribution will find it an advantage in certain markets.

Compliance costs will compound. Each of these pressures managed individually is workable. Together, over time, they change the unit economics of running a business, particularly a smaller one. Understanding that dynamic now is more useful than absorbing it piecemeal over the next five years.

None of this is a verdict on whether any of these policies are right. But planning the next five years as though the environment will ease is a specific bet. It may not be the right one.

Where the opportunity sits

The same understanding that maps the risks also shows you where to position.

Businesses that invest in their people ahead of legislation, for commercial reasons rather than purely regulatory ones, tend to do better on both sides. Workforce stability, lower turnover, stronger culture: these compound in ways that reactive businesses find hard to replicate.

The other edge goes to businesses that understand where the policy environment is heading and position accordingly. Public sector relationships carry more value when the government actively favours partnership with business. Reading what the major think tanks across the spectrum are currently publishing is competitive intelligence that most business owners haven’t considered as a planning tool. A Fabian Society paper published this year is often a reasonable preview of where Labour’s policy instincts will be in three to five years. The same logic applies to organisations on the other side.

Frustration closes the aperture. Curiosity keeps it open. That’s been the most useful thing I’ve taken from this.

The question I’m sitting with

I’m still not certain who I’d vote for in the next election. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

What I’m more certain about is that the answer matters less to business planning than we tend to assume. The intellectual weather system operates largely independently of which party wins.

The question worth sitting with is this: are you planning for the business environment you want, or the one that’s actually arriving?

Those might be the same plan. But it’s worth checking.

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

If you’re after silver-bullet promises, I’m not your guy. If you’d rather have grounded advice and better questions, you’re in the right place.