LBB - Why we did it
January 2025 , Chris Bullick
It is the best of times and the worst of times.
On the one hand, a breath of fresh air is blowing through the West thanks to events in America. Woke ideology with its suffocating baggage of hypocritical and destructive dogmas is clearly on the retreat. A personal favourite of mine (I’m in marketing) - ‘Brand Purpose’ - where brands purport to abdicate their commercial purpose in favour of supporting ‘progressive’ causes unrelated to their business or customers, has finally fallen out of favour after 10 years of barely challenged industry groupthink. The same goes of course for other dishonest corporate distractions like DEI and ESG – at least over the pond.
While at the same time, after experiencing 14 years of fiscal incontinence and rising taxes under a socialist government masquerading as a Conservative one, UK small businesses are now experiencing what a true socialist government can do to growth through what the wonderful David Starkey calls ‘Magic Thinking’. Trying to find the right weasel words to define their economic 'growth' policies, while handing largesse to the public sector and punishing private employment, employers and employees. No wonder we have experienced nothing but declining GDP per head since 2019
As a result, Britain is going to watch the already wide-growing gap between wealth in the US and the UK grow exponentially as the US rolls back public largesse in favour of private enterprise and real wealth production. All the while we will suffer Stalinist 10 year plans, increased public ‘investment’ (actually spending of course, with the usual associated declining productivity), more taxes, crony government collusion with globalists and big corporates, higher interest rates and inflation. It’s like 1974 all over again. Things may have to get just as bad before they get better.
This is where LBB – Let Business Be comes in. The founders were all Covid dissidents. We all took to Toby Young’s Lockdown Sceptics like ducks to water and it is how we met (Covid had the real benefit of facilitating almost instant, and deeply trusting new relationships among fellow dissidents). Two of us wrote articles for what we know and love now as the Daily Sceptic, and flirted daily with the risk of being censored on LinkedIn for opposing government overreach over Covid. Unsurprisingly perhaps we shared similar views on all the Lies of Our Times.
Running small agencies in the marketing world, we were appalled by the establishment’s response to Covid. Happily decimating small businesses while spraying money like drunken sailors – largely in an attempt to avoid ever being personally accused of ‘not doing something’. At the same time, exerting an authoritarian grip on allowed ‘scientific’ and public opinion. For us it was all just too much. None of us had any politics in our history. But having (most of us) reached quite a ripe age, we felt politicised by the madness. We didn’t feel we could stand by and do nothing. There were already some great activist groups like #together and Smile Free but we felt that the voice we needed to try to champion was of small businesses. We had seen what the Covid policies had done to our businesses and how little successive governments cared for the free enterprise that should be at the heart of our economy.
So a group of us got together in a pub (where all good insurrections start) in March 2023. What we agreed was that we needed to resist. We didn’t really want to frame this as political – especially not as left-right political. Our paradigm was one of makers and takers. The takers were the unproductive public sector on pay premiums and gold-plated pensions, governments in cahoots with big business and globalists, big businesses with tax and favour status. The makers were those in the rump of small and medium-sized business who pay for everything the takers take. Well before the arrival of our latest government, we felt we lived in a regime that rewarded blind obedience and even failure, but was stifling free enterprise and entrepreneurialism with the ever-increasing burden of regulations and taxes. The only act a government can take to help business is to reduce its own scope, it’s reach, it’s cost and get out of the way. This is what we wanted. And now of course we have a government that thinks it can command an economy to grow – if only it could find the right words to command it with.
We all have day-jobs, so LBB has been a bit of while in the making. But we have just launched our website – currently in beta at https://lbb.wm1.datasouth.net . We plan to add stories, link to interesting stories seen elsewhere, and provide resources of interest to fellow dissidents and like minds. Also a forum for those like minds to start discussion threads of relevance to freedom and small businesses.
What do we want to achieve? Well that is in our charter. What we don’t yet know is how. That is why we have launched the website. We suspect that there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who share our aims. It is clear to us that there is no organisation that speaks for small businesses and the ‘makers’, and proactively lobbies on their behalf. So our website is designed to uncover the latent level of interest in an organisation or group that would do that.
