Towards a new covenant

Mike King discusses a recent event

In late March I attended a business event at the Tate Modern entitled ‘Business in Society: Towards A New Covenant’, having been invited by the Quakers and Business Group. I joined this organisation recently, having approached it about my forthcoming book, Quakernomics: An ethical capitalism.  The evening event featured a panel of speakers including Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the chief executive officer of E L Rothschild LLC, and Shubhro Sen, the director of the Tata Management Training Centre (the Tata Group is a huge Indian multinational corporation). Other panelists included Steven Haberman, dean of the Cass Business School, Fiona Woolf, the future lord mayor of London and Richard Howitt, the European parliament rapporteur on corporate social responsibility.

The presentations were, broadly, on the theme of ethical capitalism, corporate social responsibility and how a new covenant between society and business is needed. The behaviour of the banks in recent years has been seen as a betrayal of the old covenant.

With around a hundred delegates present, it took a bit of luck to get a question in edgeways at the end. I told the panel that I had been researching the history of the Quaker industries as an ethical capitalism.  Given the scale of their philanthropy and the scale of their success, I had wondered why their approach had not been universally adopted. I had been looking for the ‘kryptonite’ to Quakernomics, and would the panel agree that I had found it in the legacy of Milton Friedman? Friedman’s work was the economic inspiration for Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet.

Several of the panelists made responses to this, though their time was short. Lynn Forester de Rothschild was directed by the chair to answer a different question but expressed regret: she wanted to talk about Quakernomics. ‘Does that make you Lois Lane?’ joked the chair. Another panelist seemed put out by my question and suggested that if he was my doctoral supervisor he might fail me. A kindly Quaker delegate afterwards thought I had been rather harshly treated, but I told her that I took it as a good sign. Whether the responses were friendly or not, it doesn’t matter: the Quakers got on the agenda!

In fact, my question was directly followed by a question from another member of the Quakers and Business Group, and the term ‘Quakernomics’ got bandied about a bit afterwards. Not a bad evening’s work, I thought.

This was followed by a rather unQuakerly thought on a different issue, which I shared with a business journalist who readily agreed with me (and then wanted to know if there was a Meeting in her area). ‘It seems to me when I attend such occasions,’ I mused to the young lady as we surveyed the view of the Thames and St Paul’s from the sixth floor of the Tate Modern, ‘that one could rather live on red wine and canapés.’

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