FTI Consulting Public Affairs Christmas Snapshot 2022

Analysis and predictions from FTI Consulting’s UK Public Affairs Team

In 1888, our German friends experienced “the year of the three Kaisers.” Such turbulence in leadership was unparalleled, they thought. Hold my beer, said the UK in 2022.

It has been an interesting year for those delivering political counsel. Just as maps and plans emerged from the challenges of the coronavirus period, they required immediate revision – and then revision again – at the drop of a hat.

But the country now seems set on a Sunak premiership until the next election, and in what follows the FTI UK Public Affairs team – now over 40 professionals strong – seeks to take a sector-by-sector, party-by-party look at what that will mean for politics in 2023.

I think that a couple of cross-cutting themes have emerged as we applied ourselves to this exercise.

The first is the rise of the importance placed on positions taken by the Labour Party. The Conservatives can comfort themselves with the fact that party polling isn’t quite like 1997, or that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair – but there’s no doubt about the increased relevance of Labour’s policies. Behave, we gather the Leader of the Opposition has told his Shadow Cabinet, as if you were in government already. Sails have been trimmed. Excesses have been abandoned. Labour seeks to present itself as the coming power, and business is responding accordingly.

Secondly, trade questions – once perhaps not the most glamorous amongst political topics – are genuinely taking an increasingly central place in client considerations when it comes to the UK market. Perhaps this might have been expected sooner given Brexit, but here we are – from tariffs to tax breaks to foreign ownership, we find our trade experts increasingly called upon for counsel across our briefs.