Apologies for the late arrival. Rain affected play! Don’t worry. You lose nothing by reading this missive, because tonight you can claim the time back. It’s like I wasn’t here.

Depressed by the state of UK politics? Want the good news or the bad news?
The good news is that there was an excellent presentation, with ‘hot off the press’ polling data at this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit. The bad news is that, however you slice and dice it, we are currently heading for an ‘incredibly messy hung parliament’, according to Lord Andrew Cooper, partner at FGS Global.

Yet the electoral arithmetic only tells part of the story. The more important trend (which is also being seen across Europe) may be what is driving it: support for the mainstream parties continues to fragment, producing an increasingly splintered political landscape.

And due to the vagaries of the British electoral system, the indications are that ‘dozens and dozens’ of MPs will get elected at the next election with majorities of as little as one or two per cent, which could mean tactical voting becomes incredibly significant.

As Lord Cooper warned: ‘Beneath all of that incredible volatility are strong signals of populism.’

Drawing on Moisés Naím’s book The Revenge of Power, he defined populism as ‘a mechanism for dividing every issue on the basis of a fault line between a corrupted elite and a virtuous people’ and warned that the evidence suggests it is becoming the consensus.

Or, as his colleague Stephen Adams, partner in FGS’s Global Policy Intelligence and Advisory Practice, so eloquently put it, the perception that the ‘elites’ are ‘screwing’ ordinary people.

FGS Global’s polling found that 69 per cent of voters perceive Britain as ‘broken’, requiring new political forces to fix it, while more than 70 per cent believe large British businesses can’t be trusted to put the needs of the country or its people before their own interests. And more than three in four people currently think the government does too little to protect them from the actions of large corporations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a majority believe ‘people like me’ pay way too much tax while everybody else – big business, banks, millionaires, tech and energy companies, you name it – does not pay enough.

But digging deeper into the polling data, Adams revealed two distinct types of populism: national and economic.

The ‘national populists’ favour strong leaders, prioritise British interests over international ones, tend to be pro-Brexit and are concerned about immigration. They comprise one third of the population and (knock me down with that proverbial feather) are predominantly right-wing Conservatives and Reform voters.

‘Economic populists’ favour public ownership and windfall taxes. They believe business and media serve the elite and not the interests of ordinary people. They make up half the population, comprising members of the Labour left, the Lib Dem left and the Greens.

(The remainder represent a tiny minority of the British population who trust both business and government and are likely to sit on either the right of the Labour Party, the right of the Lib Dem party, or be a Conservative wet!)

What does this all mean for business? Well, according to FGS Global partner Rebecca Park, quite a lot. Politicians, it seems, are nothing if not political. They respond to the national mood. It doesn’t matter that big business can legitimately argue the potential negative knock-on effects of taxes, such as a windfall levy; the British public overwhelmingly support such moves.

Across the voters of every UK political party, support for increasing capital gains tax to match income tax, putting windfall taxes on energy and other forms of big business and banking, runs between 65 per cent and 75 per cent.

‘Those are dream numbers if you’re a politician, particularly if you’re a politician with a very weak marginal seat,’ Park explained.

With most MPs likely to fall into that bracket after the next election, businesses need to change the way they engage on these subjects. Park highlighted four traps that businesses should avoid.

1.  Do not assume populism is solely a Reform issue. A bigger question is how populism is changing the way other political parties think about the issues.

2. Do not assume this discussion is limited to policy makers. Park pointed out that roughly 68 per cent of the population broadly hold these views: that also translates into around 68 per cent of employees and customers. The views of the company ExCo may thus not align with its workforce.

3. Do not rely on evidence alone. The old, trusted method of commissioning a Big Four report, with detailed data analysis, that proved your policy ask or point of view is unlikely to work with a politician clinging to a 2,500-vote majority. ‘Technical cases may have won in the past, but they won’t be the only route to winning right now, particularly where those decision makers are more political,’ warned Park.

4. Stop chasing ministerial access. Ministers change. Invest time in the officials, directorates and regulators beneath them, and in the regional mayors gaining new powers. As she put it: ‘The team writing the day one briefs for ministers remains the same.’

She summed up: ‘It’s not a populist conversation of whether it’s left or right anymore. It’s a mindset, a mode of how issues are getting pulled, that we are seeing not just in the UK.

‘We could be having this conversation in most of the core European nations, who have elections on the horizon…driven by these very economic populists, and sometimes, nationalist populist dialogues.’

Underpinning all of this is trust. As Park put it: ‘It’s trust and legitimacy that decides whether your argument lands.’ If large swathes of the public believe business is part of the problem rather than part of the solution, then the strongest economic argument in the world may not be enough.

Which may mean picking your battles. On business tax, Adams was blunt: ‘These are not arguments we’re going to win in public. We’re not going to win them with op-eds in The Times.’ Park went further, warning that going public ‘may actually make the debate worse’.

With so few politicians willing to make the case for business, Lord Cooper suggested companies need to find trusted third parties to do it for them. His suggestion? MoneySavingExpert founder Martin Lewis AKA ‘the most trusted man in Britain’.

Given that Lewis made his name taking on the banks and energy companies on behalf of consumers, that may be one call he doesn’t return.

The rise of strategic silence

While FGS Global suggested that populism is already shaping politics, the latest Reputation Council report from Ipsos indicates it is influencing corporate behaviour.

Nearly half – 46 per cent – of the Council’s 200 members now perceive populism as a material risk to their organisations. And companies are responding accordingly.

Issues once deemed uncontroversial can generate sharply different reactions across different stakeholder groups; consequently one third – 35 per cent – of respondents are now silent about issues on which they would once have spoken out.

And a whopping 84 per cent admit political considerations come into play when deciding whether to be vocal on issues.

Ipsos calls this ‘strategic silence’. Those who stay quiet cite a mixture of strategic and defensive reasons for doing so. But silence carries risk: some respondents reported having to explain their rationale to stakeholders unhappy that they had not spoken out.

Although companies say purpose and credibility help determine when they speak up, silence has become the norm: 61 per cent of Council Members would rather stay quiet on divisive issues, even when they could speak authentically.

As one Council Member put it, the answer is to ‘choose your battles and have selective courage’. The hard part is knowing which battles are worth fighting.

What Aberfan still teaches us

Sixty years ago this week, tragedy befell the South Wales mining village of Aberfan. On 21 October 1966, a mountain of coal waste, rock and water cascaded down a neighbouring hillside, engulfing the local junior school and 20 nearby houses. It killed 144 people, including 116 children.

It remains one of the worst disasters in modern UK history.

And it was totally preventable.

Structural engineers had warned the National Coal Board (NCB) that mining debris should not be piled on hillsides, above springs or higher than 20 feet. The spoil tips towering above Aberfan breached every one of those principles. Residents had also raised concerns about the risks. Indeed, there had been two similar collapses (with less disastrous consequences) in previous years.

But, while the catastrophe was devastating, what followed was appalling. Rather than rushing to the scene of the disaster, NCB chairman Lord Robens proceeded with his installation as Chancellor of the University of Surrey, only arriving the following evening.

His conduct, including an attempt to blame ‘unknown springs’, came to symbolise an organisation that appeared more concerned with protecting itself than supporting the community it had failed.

That perception merely hardened when the NCB initially offered compensation of just £50 – roughly equivalent to a miner’s monthly wage (or £1,000 today) – to bereaved parents, regardless of whether they had lost one child or three. (Following objections, the offer was later raised to £500 per family, which the NCB described as ‘a generous donation’, as if this was somehow a gift bestowed upon them by a benefactor.)

Taken together, these actions amount to a masterclass in how not to manage a crisis.

But the NCB was not the only institution to fail the community. The Aberfan Disaster Memorial Fund, established by the Mayor of Merthyr Tydfil, had raised £1.6 million (equivalent to more than £30 million today) by the time it closed three months later.

Regulated by the Charity Commission, the fund’s trustees were instructed to ascertain whether bereaved parents had ‘been close to their children’ before granting any monies. They were also threatened with removal if they made ‘quite illegal’ (the Commission’s term) payments to the parents of physically uninjured children for their mental suffering.

Indeed, it seems scant attention was paid to the emotional toll suffered by the villagers. The NCB and politicians failed to appreciate the inherent fear in the community that the spoil tips still looming above the village might also collapse.

The then Welsh Secretary George Thomas described it as ‘psychological’ rather than real, while Lord Robens said ‘these people’ did not understand the cost or the challenge in removing the tips.

It took two years of campaigning by Aberfan residents before the government acquiesced to their demand. But their celebrations were short-lived: the removal was on condition that the Memorial Fund contributed £250,000 (later reduced to £150,000) to the cost. No money. No removal. As slaps in the face go, this was a full-handed one.

(Ultimately, the £150,000 was repaid in 1997, without interest, while ten years later the Welsh Government contributed £2 million to Aberfan’s charities.)

I’d like to think that such treatment belongs to another era. But there have been powerful reminders – Hillsborough, Grenfell, the Post Office Horizon scandal – that the old playbook still gets rolled out: deny, defend, delay and hope the problem goes away. Meanwhile, those affected find themselves fighting both for justice and to be heard.

The Aberfan disaster was over in minutes. Yet the damage caused by the response to the crisis has not diminished. The mining communities of South Wales were used to tragedies, albeit not of this scale. What the people of Aberfan wanted was honesty, humanity and action. Instead, they encountered defensiveness, obfuscation, bureaucracy and a lack of empathy. It’s why, sixty years on, the tragedy still hurts.

That’s the thing about crises. The disaster creates the crisis. The response creates the legacy.