New consumers, your world needs YOU

On Valentine's day I enjoyed a corporate love-in. I attended my fourth annual Business in the Community (BITC) conference in six years. It is always fascinating to hear what the leaders of the world's leading corporations have to say, especially when Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the focus.

While I greatly respect BITC and the excellent programmes it runs throughout the UK, their annual event always reinforces for me how crazy and dangerous CSR can be. Year after year we celebrate the best responsible companies while the global issues we face appear more serious and more intractable than ever. Surely this is a classic case of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Not for the first time I heard a quite stunning address from one of the keynote speakers. Alain Grisay suggested that businesses could not gain from operating sustainably, that the short term view was the only possible view to take. He also described what he saw as the tendency of government to do the will of business, not the will of the people.

He declared that the only way for business to change was if it had proper incentives to take a longer term view, to pursue sustainability alongside profit making, and that this could only happen if governments were prepared to create better legislation. Mr Grisay is the chief executive of F&C, a fund management firm with £100 billion of assets, he is as much a business insider and capitalist crusader as it is possible to be.

In many ways this was exciting and compelling stuff. This major league asset manager sounded like a campaigner for corporate reform. He was echoing what the CORE Coalition, an umbrella organisation of over 130 civil society groups, has been advocating for years; that is government stops waiting for the voluntary approach to corporate responsibility to bear fruit and admit that legally enforcing longer term profit horizons is the only way to create desperately needed change.

However, what he did not add was that the Operating and Financial Review, an all but enacted addition to company law that required companies to report on a much wider range of social and environmental issues and make forward looking statements regarding related risks, was repealed at the eleventh hour, to astonishment from all quarters, after seven years of hard work and eventual acquiescence from business. Nor that this lamentable sop to the business lobby was a chest-beating stunt from the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

For the foreseeable future, at least, government will always do the will of business ahead of the will of the people. This is why people that care for the planet and our collective future need to take matters into their own hands. Please, for all our sakes, support businesses that demonstrate they take social, environmental and ethical issues seriously, stop buying from those that don't!