If the CBI didn’t exist, would it be invented? We may be about to find out

Editorial: The employers’ body does good policy work but it seems like a leftover from a lost age

The durability of the CBI over the past few decades seemed to attest to its success (PA)

The Confederation of British Industry was formed by the merger of three bodies representing business in 1965, in the heyday of what was known as corporatism.

The assumption since the Second World War had been that representatives of business, or more narrowly employers, should “get round the table” with trades unions and government to decide what the British economy needed and make the arrangements necessary to achieve it. By 1965, the intellectual fashion of the day was in favour of even more national planning.

The Labour government, led by Harold Wilson, had come to power hoping that a more systematic national plan would help the British economy to make a great leap forward in productivity – after the failure of the “dash for growth” under Harold Macmillan in 1962. The consensus across both main parties was that state planning gave the citizens of the Soviet Union an advantage over the capitalist world and that we would have to join them to beat them.