No One Is Above The Law

We want the SMEalliance to bring companies together, to be able share their vast amount of knowledge and successes and to understand why businesses fail  We want the organisation to be able to stand up to vested interests where necessary but wherever possible to work with all other like minded groups and organisations.We aim to be a lobbying group for this massive constituency. We want to help people whenever we can. We don't want to be a faceless, distant and unknown organisation. So you know what , we won't be ! Look what we've done in five weeks. In the next five months .... who can possibly know.

I am sure you know the old saying " A week is a long time in politics". Well I reckon the SMEalliance can top that.

Five weeks ago Nikki Turner ( who I had never met or spoken to before) and I had a telephone discussion and now....... here we are. Website up and running , same with our twitter account ; membership arrangements ready to roll, so onwards and upwards.

Blog Author

Nick Gould
Co-Founder of SME Alliance

What does that tell us ? Perhaps that if a few like minded people have an idea and a group around them, equally like minded and committed to that idea which they all believe will become something extraordinary , and they don't just talk about  it , but do it ...then that idea can come into existence .

From what I know not only of Nikki but also about the other core members of the SMEalliance, they all hold very strong views about many things. Mostly at the moment about the behavior of the UKs major banks and more importantly the holding to account of those who run and who ran them. Many of these members have every right to those views -- watch this space for more . We know there are other groups who are involved actively in this appalling saga. We intend  to push the debate to a much higher level. We want MPs, regulators and senior management of the banks themselves to understand this is not going to go away. As one well known Prime Minister said " we're all in this together". But we're not really, are we?We need actions to replace not only unacceptably delays but what can only be described as a disgraceful lack of understanding /compassion ( a word unknown to too many these days ) by those who ought to know better.The genuine sense of injustice and inability to access the law for redress felt by many ought to be resolved by the famous quotation from Theodore Roosevelt which we intend to make one of our core objectives. Roosevelt said  "No-one is above the law."  At the moment (very sadly)  it has been better defined  by Professor Richard Moorhead -- of the Centre for  of Ethics and Law at University College Law School as "No one is above the law but some are not above it more than others " ( think about it).

But the SME alliance is absolutely not, not just about the banks. It might be about so many other matters you all know about  but don't ever seem to begin to get fixed. For example , the inability to raise finance , the amount of irrelevant red-tape stopping business growth ; the idea of a " Smaller Companies Companies Act"; a way of breaking down the huge blocks / silos between difference groups , such as the SMEs themselves, academics, Westminster /Whitehall and professional advisors. After all, it all seems to work much better  at the level of the FTSE companies, why not here ?

We understand we can't currently solve any of these and other  problems encountered by so many SMEs. Nor are we arrogant enough to say otherwise. However ,SMEs make up a vast constituency in the UK. You may know the figures . Some 99% of all companies are SMEs. They employ together over 24 million people and contribute more than £1,500 billion, to the UK economy. There should be  a much greater effective voice for those companies somewhere. Maybe you , too, can be part of that voice.