Hi everyone, I’ve been developing an idea for a UK charity / foundation and wanted to sanity-check it with people I trust before going any further. In simple terms: profit has lost its moral legitimacy in the UK. That’s dangerous, because without profitable, growing, trusted enterprises, you can’t fund jobs, innovation, or public services. Right now, “record profits” has become shorthand for exploitation. The public doesn’t distinguish between: • Good profit — earned through value creation, fair pay, innovation, efficiency • Bad profit — extracted through monopoly power, opacity, wage suppression, or short-termism The result is that SMEs and responsible founders get tarred with the same brush as the worst corporate actors, and the narrative vacuum is being filled by blunt anti-business populism. The idea is a Living Wage Foundation–style organisation, but focused on re-legitimising ethical, earned profit while clearly calling out predatory profiteering. I’m not selling anything here and I’m very early — I’m trying to work out: • Is this a real gap others are seeing too? • Would anyone be interested in exploring this collaboratively (policy, comms, research, governance, funding)? • Or is this a terrible idea for reasons I haven’t spotted yet? If this resonates, I’d love to chat or spin up a small working group to pressure-test it properly. If it doesn’t, honest pushback very welcome. Reply here or DM me; either way, appreciate the brains in this room.
Interesting framing. Feels like the problem isn’t profit itself but opacity and distance from value creation as systems scale.
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