Industry Leaders Have Blunt Words For Imploring Sunak

When it comes to business, the government has replaced the F word with a C word: Connect! "We're ashamedly pro-business," prime minister Rishi Sunak declared to a gathering of industry leaders as he launched the initiative Business Connect yesterday. Some may see that as a bit rich coming from a man dealing with what I see as the most anti-business policy this nation has ever had foisted upon it.

- JAMES MOORE

That would be Brexit. Of course, the ruinously hard version of it was Boris Johnson's gift to the nation. Sunak, Johnson's former chancellor, has meanwhile managed to smooth the roughest of its edges - the Nothern Ireland protocol - with his Windsor Framework. It sailed through the House of Commons and eased the very real fears of a potentially ruinous trade war with Britain's biggest trading partner.

The level of concern caused by Brexit among some of Britain's top finance directors - per a recent Deloitte survey - has fallen to a six-year low. So there's that. And, really, anything is an improvement given how the concerns of the high priests of British commerce were dismissed under previous Tory administrations. The latter was exemplified by Boris Johnson's reported off-camera "fuck business" comment.