The dog that didn't bark

To be honest, I'm not looking forward to election day tomorrow. If the polling is right we can expect a Conservative majority and Brexit to go ahead, neither of which are my favoured outcomes! I thought the same would happen in 2017 and it didn't, so who knows.
Also in 2017 I blogged about how in my corner of the world a broadly 'Left' take on corporate governance was winning, even as it looked life the Left was losing in the Big P political field. This trend has only continued in the following 2 years. Positions that were once only advocated by the likes of the TUC, High Pay Centre etc have become fairly standard.
Another thing I've blogged before is that the political value of business endorsements in election campaigns has declined significantly. It might even be a net negative now. And this is a point on which Boris Johnson, a politician who seems to have no guiding purpose except getting into power, is obviously alert to.
In this respect it's interesting to note that in this election one of the previous staples of Conservative campaigns is missing (no, not Jacob Rees Mogg...): the collective statement from business leaders warning against a Labour government. This was literally a front page attack in the 2015 campaign. So where is it this time? I can't believe that the Conservatives couldn't organise a similar joint letter now, when Labour is positioned further to the Left and advocating taking some businesses into public ownership. Perhaps some feel it is too dangerous to speak out, but there must be a reliable core of party funders and friends that could be put together.
So my gut feeling is that the Conservative campaign team may think that such an endorsement (or, seen the other way, corporate attack on a particular outcome) would be a net negative. Certainly you can imagine Labour immediately trying to flip it into evidence that corporate interests dominate Right politics. If my hunch is right, then it's just a bit more of an indication of how politics has changed from the 1990s, and from the crash in particular. It has some interesting implications for those of us in ESG land, which I'll return to at some point.

PS - VOTE LABOUR.