“If you are seen as a Labour businessperson, you are diminished.” Simon Franks, the co-founder of LoveFilm, is adamant that the dearth of visible business backers for Ed Miliband’s party has more to do with fears about being ribbed as a lefty than any of Labour’s policies. “This idea that Labour’s not pro-business – if anyone wants to debate that with me, send them over,” he says over coffee at a Bloomsbury hotel.
“In the current circumstances, it’s quite frustrating for those people who are involved in business who are supporters of the Labour party to see how manipulative some of the rightwing media can be. People have open ears to hear some things and closed ears to hear other things.”
Since the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, was pilloried earlier this month for struggling to name a high-profile business backer, many left-leaning business leaders have chosen to stay silent. Few have joined loyal supporters such as Labour peer Lord Charles Allen, of Global Radio, and former minister Lord Myners in singing the party’s praises. But Franks last week joined Dale Vince, founder of renewable energy provider Ecotricity, in declaring his public backing for Miliband and his team. “I can tell you after working with Labour for over a year that these guys are very focused on creating a vibrant economy,” he says.
Vince, as a former new age traveller who prefers ripped jeans and leather jackets to suits and a briefcase, perhaps better fits the stereotype of a Green party supporter than a Labour man. But on Tuesday he announced that Ecotricity would donate £250,000 to Labour to fight “the existential threat” of a second-term Tory government.
He too blames media stereotypes for giving the impression that Labour is hostile to enterprise. He says Labour has “a pro-business agenda” and applauds policies to investigate competition in the banking sector and reintroduce a 50p top rate of income tax for people earning more than £150,000 a year.
But his main reason for bankrolling Labour is David Cameron’s opposition to onshore wind power. The prime minister has claimed – in contradiction to opinion polls – that the country is “fed up” with turbines and promised to get rid of subsidies for onshore wind. “David Cameron will ban onshore wind and is likely to ban solar as well … so we will never meet our carbon targets. I don’t think the new Tories, the ‘David Cameron 2.0’ Tories, care about the Climate Act, the carbon targets that have been agreed.”
Climate change is far from the only issue. Also fuelling Vince’s anger with the Conservatives are proliferating food banks, the “spiteful” bedroom tax and “the whole hypocrisy of tax breaks and tax avoidance at the top end and the merciless clampdown on benefits at the bottom end”. He adds: “You know, this is the kind of country I live in, and I don’t like it. I think Cameron has turned out to be Thatcher with knobs on.”
That sense of fairness and social justice motivates Franks, too. “I think there will always be a divide between those people who want to represent the nation as a whole and those who want to represent a certain group within that country.”
But he does echo some of the concerns voiced privately by other left-of-centre business leaders about the tone of rhetoric about business from Miliband, who has tended to take a more combative approach to capitalists than Balls, or shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna. In particular, some of Miliband’s remarks about “predators”, in his 2011 party conference speech, when he announced the party’s plans to freeze utility bills, have put some in the corporate world on the defensive.
“One of the things that I have heard is that some of the language sounded wrong. We have to be so precise,” he says. “I absolutely understood what he [Miliband] was saying. I wish I had been standing next to him when he said that and perhaps I would have wanted to clarify it a bit.”
Yet he insists the party leader was right to throw open the debate about business and its role in society — and he understands why many voters are deeply sceptical. “There are absolutely some business people out there who seem to not give a damn about the environment, about fairness, about workers’ rights.”
“I’m a capitalist, but I’m certainly not someone who is comfortable with the path that capitalism has taken,” he says. “If we keep on this path, we’ll all be living in gated communities, like in Johannesburg. I don’t want that. I want my children to be able to walk down the street without being attacked for their financial status.”
Franks created online film distributor Redbus and sold it for £20m, going on to co-found what became LoveFilm through an aggressive acquisition spree. Since selling to Amazon and stepping back from the business, he has spent much of the past seven years in developing countries, overseeing the work of his philanthropic foundation. He came back to Britain last year because “I have come to the conclusion that philanthropy in its typical sense of charity is not the solution to the world’s problems. Sadly, the solution is political”.
That is why he agreed to produce a report for Labour on policies to support entrepreneurs. Indeed, he has even considered standing for parliament as a Labour candidate – although he fears he would get himself into too many “scrapes”. Recalling shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt’s recent grovel, after appearing to dismiss the teaching ability of nuns on Question Time, he says: “I would just say, ‘nuns, get over it’”.
Vince, too, prefers plain speaking to corporate cant – and is even willing to suggest that Tory householders should go elsewhere to buy their energy if they object to his stance. “If we had a customer who was a Conservative supporter and said, ‘Look, I am leaving,’ I would say, ‘Fair enough, because we have completely different views of what the world should look like.’”
