Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, the Conservative Party in the UK has been associated with the interests of big business.

Yet it looks, on the surface at least, as if all that’s about to change under the party’s new leader, David Cameron. As the media has widely reported, Cameron has pledged that a Conservative government would ‘stand up to big business’.

This statement raises a crucial question: What should be the relationship between government and business?

The Bible appears to suggest that distinctive ‘spheres’ within society - economic, military, religious, legal, domestic – should co-exist without being subsumed under an all-pervasive ‘state’. This is reflected, for instance, in the dire warnings about the exercise of political power over the economic sphere at the institution of the kingship (1 Samuel 8), and in the increasing separation of the priestly, prophetic and kingly roles.

These insights, together with the New Testament principle that political power has no authority over religious matters (Acts 4.19-20), have influenced a school of thought emanating most notably from the politician and theologian Abraham Kuyper, which maintains that the power of the state is to be strictly limited.

Whereas we tend to focus, today, on the dichotomy between state and market, this school argues instead that human culture is made up of a plethora of institutions, or ‘mediating structures’ - such as families, schools, hospitals, religious bodies, businesses, voluntary associations - each responsible, in its own way, for serving the common good but each enjoying relative autonomy and freedom from state control.

This kind of social philosophy lay in part behind Mrs Thatcher’s widely misinterpreted claim that ‘There is no such thing as society’ - a claim Cameron cunningly both dismissed and affirmed by observing,‘There is such a thing as society – it’s just not the same thing as the state’ (in the speech that’s widely credited as having won him the Tory leadership at the 2005 party conference).

But it’s now Cameron’s turn to get used to being misinterpreted. Despite the hullabaloo in the press, his statement about big business actually went like this: ‘We should not only stand up for big business but stand up to big business when it’s in the interests of Britain and the world.’

As long as he sticks to both halves of this pledge there is little cause for concern. But, if he gets to office, we must hold him to his words.

Peter Heslam

Peter Heslam is a senior research associate of LICC, and director of Transforming Business, Cambridge University

additional resources

Peter Heslam's Transforming Business website is at www.transformingbusiness.net.

The most decisive and influential critique of big business remains Naomi Klein's best-seller No Logo. Cameron may be among the millions who have read it. Its subtitle is 'Taking aim at the brand bullies'. The No Logo website can be found at www.nologo.org.

For an article attacking Christian Aid's opposition to free trade, written in the wake of Cameron's criticism of Christian Aid, see www.globalisationinstitute.org.

An exposition of Abraham Kuyper's socio-political philosophy, often refered to as 'sphere-sovereignty', is contained in Peter Heslam's book on Kuyper - Creating a Christian Worldview (Eerdmans/Paternoster, 1998) - or his article 'Prophet of the Third Way: The Shape of Kuyper's Socio-Political Vision', in Markets and Morality, available here - www.acton.org/publicat/m_and_m/2002_spring/heslam.html.

For an attempt to apply 'sphere-sovereignty' to modern economic institutions, see an article by Ray Pennings of the Work Research Foundation - at http://wrf.ca/comment/article.cfm?ID=35.

Excellent discussions of political theory from a Christian perspective informed by Kuyper's insights can be found in Political Theory and Christian Vision, edited by Jonathan Chaplin and Paul Marshall (University Press of America, 1994).

David Cameron's speech at the 2005 Conservative Party Conference can be found at www.conservatives.com. His most recent speech on poverty and social justice can be found here too.

For Margaret Thatcher's later reflections on her 'There is no such thing as society' statement, see her memoirs - The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993), p. 626.