There was a time when the Institute of Directors was a hotbed of Thatcherism. Its members were gung-ho for the free market, tax cuts, privatisation and economic liberalism in its purest form. But that was in the 1980s and early 1990s and it is a different story now. Earlier this week, the IoD called on the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to be more than simply a bean counter in next week’s budget and urged the government to come up with its own version of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
This is some change of heart. The IRA is a $370bn (£312bn) package of protectionism, state aid and subsidies designed to galvanise American business in the fight against climate change. Where once the IRA would once have been everything it loathed, here was the IoD warning that “short-term budgetary concerns” should not be allowed to trump the “strategic imperative of establishing market leadership positions in green business”.
