Finally, Theresa May, Agrees To Meet With British Business Community After Months Of Hostility

Theresa May has finally agreed to meet Britain’s leading big business body, after months of hostile rhetoric and cold-shouldering sparked widespread industry alarm.

The U.K. prime minister will hold clear-the-air talks with the head of the Confederation of British Industry Carolyn Fairbairn in Downing Street later this month, senior business and government sources confirmed.

The CBI’s mounting frustration with Number 10 became public last month when Fairbairn, its director general, publicly accused the prime minister of “closing the door” on Britain’s open economy in an interview with the Times.

The intervention gave voice to broad industry concern that the new prime minister was proving far less business friendly than her predecessor David Cameron.

May entered Downing Street with a promise to be guided “not by the interests of the privileged few” but by the concerns of ordinary workers. A few months later, her hardline rhetoric on immigration at the Conservative Party conference, which suggested the government was headed for a hard-Brexit outside the European single market, sparked boardroom concern that 30 years of liberal economic consensus was coming to an end.

It was also in stark contrast to the vision laid out by the leading Brexiteers during the referendum campaign, which promised to turn Britain into a free-market dynamo outside the EU.

                                   Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Carolyn Fairbairn

Fairburn’s public attack on May infuriated Number 10, said one senior Tory source with close connections to Downing Street. “She took a decision to go nuclear,” the source said, before warning the prime minister’s team continues to view Fairbairn’s close connection to George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, with suspicion.

-politico