I have spent most of my life involved business, whether it be corporate multi-nationals, on the board of family businesses or as an entrepreneur establishing and investing in enterprise. I also had the privilege of representing business on government bodies, trade associations and even as an MEP in Strasbourg and Brussels. I mention all this only to put into context what I am about to say next. Way back in 2011 when I took up the position of Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, my very first interview for broadcast media was with the venerable business journalist and broadcaster Geoff Randal.

He had seen my comments in the press and asked what I thought of the relationship between business and government. I repeated a view I had long held, that there was no political party and therefore no government that truly represented business enterprise. Yes, there was an interest in the City of London but not as a facilitator of investment and economic growth, rather as an end in itself and not least as a tax generator.

There was also an interest in business as a political connection with multi nationals , often foreign owned, as political donors or sources of future employment for politicians.

Civil servants certainly saw themselves reflected in the mirror when looking at the bureaucracies that inhabit multinationals. A symbiotic relationship between corporate lobbyists, internal compliance departments and Whitehall regulators.

All very well for the inhabitants of the CBI, but of little value to the 85% of businesses that are family-owned or run, including entrepreneurs in start-ups and sole traders.

They’re left largely off the radar, consigned to Whitehall’s too-difficult-to-deal-with box and outside the experience of most politicians and Civil Servants. Thus the very backbone of the economy is ignored.

Even worse, these are the businesses from whom the disruptors and innovators emerge, the precursors to and principle source of productivity and economic growth.

I went further, saying that you could fire a shotgun in the House of Commons and have little chance of hitting anyone who had been in business, let alone built a business. These days I would say hit by a party popper lest the woke brigade have a fit of the vapours at the thought of a shotgun.

In this current government the figure would be pretty well zero. It is perhaps surprising therefore that a likely fault line on the right of politics will be business and economic policy, perhaps the only significant divide since social, defence, justice, health, agriculture and the EU/Brexit policies of the Conservative and the Reform parties, such as we know them, are currently aping one another.

I was struck by a recent opinion piece by former PM Rishi Sunak acknowledging at last that economic growth is the key to and basis of all other policy. Without growth nothing else can be achieved except through the redistribution of a shrinking cake – which is of course the bedrock of Marxist economics.

Perhaps the penny is beginning to drop, but it remains to be seen whether our political class has the guts to lead and take with them the electorate on a step-by-step journey, along with the disruptors, innovators and entrepreneurs who are essential for growth.

We now see a dichotomy within the Conservative Party itself between those who essentially believe in the philosophy and economics of Adam Smith, or a Thatcherite version of this at least, and those in the “I’m alright Jack” blue liberals camp, who are still wedded to the managed decline of the social contract.

On the other side of the fault line of the political right are Reform UK who appear to be having a love affair with one of Enoch Powell’s heroes, Joseph Chamberlain, who argued at the beginning of the last century for “Imperial Preference” – a tariff/technical wall around the empire similar to that which the EU has built for itself.

The contemporary manifestation of this would be nationalisation of public utilities, protective measures for “key” industries like farming, steel, security and a general policy of re-industrialisation behind tariff, technical or quota barriers.

State intervention may include part-ownership or restricting competition. It is difficult to say how far this would go. Would it be pragmatism or full-on statism along the lines of China or Germany in the 1930s? Are these policies sustainable within the national debt burden?

The purity of philosophies, not least economic, rarely survive contact with reality. I would count myself as a supporter of free markets, free trade and capitalism (the latter is for a separate article), however the genius of the political right has historically been pragmatism and adaptation to reality.

Adam Smith himself wrote in his moral sentiments about how economic theory should fit with society and was clear that freedoms need defending. Pursuing free markets and free trade undoubtedly maximises productivity and economic growth with all the benefits to national wealth and prosperity that result from this.

In a world of hard power this may also have a cost. Dominance of foreign-owned multinationals in an economy may lead to serious conflicts of interest and security risks, for example.

The destruction of strategic industries may lead to the diminution of war-fighting ability. This is not fanciful. The actions of Putin have revealed that the mutually assured destruction (MAD) doctrine of Cold War nuclear deterrence has been replaced with nuclear as a last resort, a final insurance, preceded by lots of potential escalation steps of conventional warfare.

The only conclusion must surely be that an independent, sovereign nation is able to make its own policy, free trading and armed to the teeth, with no permanent enemies and no forever friends. This is our best chance of creating national wealth and maintaining liberty, the only question left concerns the balance of these competing imperatives.

It is likely that the balance will manifest itself as a key and growing difference between the policies of the tribes of the right and it will be interesting to see how the political battle lines are drawn on this most important of all matters, the economy.

John Longworth is an entrepreneur and businessman, Chairman of the Independent Business Network of family businesses and a former MEP