Left Right - Is Anyone Walking With Business?

We've been having a political debate between us this morning, Madeleine and I.

I'm a Conservative, an active one at that - and proud of it. My strand of beliefs are modern, intensely committed to diversity and to excellent core welfarism - but I explicitly place personal responsibility alongside entitlement. It's like One Nation Toryism in a multi-coloured wrap, if you like.

She says that whilst she holds a set of personal core values that might not sit unsympathically with a Conservative manifesto, she will probably end up voting Lib Dem as there are inherent unearned privilege tendencies still within the Tories which turn her off and away. When businesspeople of this calibre think like this, Messrs Cameron and Osborne need to take note.

And I have some strong sympathies with her. Every party always risks becoming a grotesque parody of what it can best offer. Take Labour: from the astonishingly can-do, galvanic, nation-building, class-flattening post-war era government, we now have the current cowering behind their own failures in a sprawl of hopeless and useless bureaucracy. Tories become self-caricatures when a balance of responsibility and entitlement bleeds away into assumed privilege.

As businesspeople, we need to start thinking of what we need to see and hear from our putative leaders. As politics has itself grown ever more into an elite activity, of whatever party, commercial experience is ever thinner on the floor of Parliament.

So, instead, perhaps we need to be listening to core values. I've been having this debate within my own branch in Manchester. Some members want to concentrate on highly localised issues; I contend that people are mature enough, sick enough of gimmicks and appeals to petty self-interest and cynical enough about politics as a whole to crave some fundamental moral platform.

On this kind of specific basis Madeleine and I agree every day within our own work. We don't go into organisations immediately promising bottom line miracles and spectacular turnarounds. We lead with values - in our case the business ethics of Community Contribution & Recognition. We argue that good things come from getting the core of human relationships and human objectives clear and functioning.

Let's listen to what our politicians say to us in the run up to the next General Election. Who understands business, let alone what makes people tick?