Charter

LET BUSINESS BE

CHARTER

Our aim is to stem the ever-encroaching wave of interferences that is overwhelming entrepreneurship and free enterprise.

We believe that our society can be divided into two categories - the Makers and the Takers.

The Makers are the entrepreneurs who establish, own, and operate small to medium-sized businesses that drive economic growth and create jobs. Also those that work in these businesses.

In recent years, the incentives for these Makers have been declining due to increased government regulation, control, taxation, and spending. Additionally, unchecked global monopolies have suppressed competition and used their market power and wealth to influence government policies and regulations in their favour. These entities have also colluded with governments to hamper free speech, and restrain the trade of businesses and media properties who do not support the approved orthodoxies. Together they are the Takers. The combined action of the Takers restricts innovation, increases barriers to entry and the cost of doing business. This leads to higher prices and poor economic growth.

Government should prioritise fostering entrepreneurship and allow market forces to operate freely which will benefit all members of society.

What we want

To be left alone. To be able to run our businesses with the minimum of interference. We want those that interfere to Let Business Be.

What we believe in

Proportionate government that aims to reduce its size.
Low regulatory burden on business.
True free market conditions with no private monopolies.
A fair corporate tax system that taxes all businesses based on profits earned in this country.
Equality of opportunity for all.
Businesses acting, as all people should, with responsibility to their staff, to communities and the societies they operate in.
Affordable energy unburdened by high taxes and subsidised ‘renewables’ – ending the demonisation and planned elimination of fossil fuels and abandoning of all Net Zero ambitions.
Environmental stewardship - focusing on actual pollutants and environmental destruction.

What we will resist

Demands for equalities of outcome.
Recruitment and hiring quotas.
A consideration of the environment that is disproportionately focused on the unproven hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change and the demonisation of carbon dioxide.
The declaration of bogus ‘emergencies’ based on alarmism.
The compilers of blacklists, shortlists and the action of organisations set up to prevent advertising on, and defund media titles who offer a different political view to themselves by bogusly accusing them of ‘disinformation’

Why we are concerned

We know Adam Smith today as the father of laissez faire ("leave alone") economics.

When Adam Smith wrote ‘Wealth of Nations’ in 1776, He expressed concern that European mercantilism depended on a web of laws, subsidies, special economic privileges, and government-licensed monopolies designed to benefit specific manufacturers and merchants. This system, however, inflated prices, hindered economic growth, limited trade, and kept the masses of people impoverished. Smith argued that the free-market system along with free trade would produce true national wealth, benefiting all social classes, not just the privileged few. To Smith, these mercantile monopolists and their allies in Parliament were the great enemies of his "free market mechanism."

In 2024 free enterprise, entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized businesses in Britain and much of the West once again face a similar set of challenges. We are under assault from a combination of forces that together disincentivise and punish free enterprise and entrepreneurship. These forces are once again driven by an elite class comprised of governments, supra-governmental bodies, quangos and monopolistic businesses who are distant to both the wealth-makers and the mainstream population. Governments are increasingly turning their apparatus of national information management upon their own people, and acting to further the interests of big businesses who then return the favours.

The Makers are being overwhelmed by an expanding government and its endless, rapacious demand for more taxes to fund more government, compliance and conformity.

We are harassed by an army of do-gooders, social justice warriors, virus and climate scaremongers, human rights activists, environmental and governance consultants, campaigners and other assorted pests. They demand compliance with an ever increasing set of often random demands fuelled by ideologies like ‘Net Zero’, or flawed concepts like diversity quotas and the gender pay gap. Dealing with these interferences are expensive, time-consuming and demoralising. Like excessive taxes, regulations and bureaucracy, attending to these things is stifling the wealth of the nation.

Originally and apparently well-intentioned initiatives to make business responsible for equality of opportunity and care for the environment have transitioned into onerous demands around DIE (diversity, inclusion and equity), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG). The demands of these approaches go way beyond ‘What we believe in’, and are becoming enshrined into government and big company procurement, corrupting otherwise positive initiatives. They are turning into a tyranny for small and medium-sized business.

Decades of missing long-term planning on energy is now exacerbated by a quasi-religious commitment to ‘renewable’ fuels and unfeasible, unachievable and un-costed Net Zero 2030. The effect has been to unjustly enrich the renewable energy sector, increase our dependence on these higher price energy sources, dramatically raise the cost of energy for consumers and businesses alike, and create a fragile infrastructure likely to fail under pressure. Whether it be energy, water or the use of private transportation, the concept of abundance through industry and efficiency is being abandoned and replaced by the concept of scarcity, control and rationing. The very opposite of free enterprise.