big on scale, light on people – Daily Business Magazine

The Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto is too cross, too narrow – and detached from most entrepreneurs, argues IAIN SCOTT

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Sir Tom Hunter the businessman and philanthropist has, through his Hunter Foundation, published a Manifesto. It is called The Entrepreneurs Manifesto. Now there is something revealing about a missing apostrophe. Entrepreneurs Manifesto. Not Entrepreneurs’. No sense of plurality, ownership, or mess. No hint that entrepreneurship might belong to lots of people, in lots of places, in lots of forms. Just a singular, polished noun-clean, abstract, and faintly rootless.

That turns out to be a fairly accurate guide to the document itself.

This manifesto is impeccably produced, heavy with statistics, confidently asserted, and set against the kind of backdrop – Gleneagles, summits, conferences – that reassures you the grown-ups are in the room. But as a statement about entrepreneurship, it feels oddly detached from how most entrepreneurship in Scotland actually happens.

Let’s start with place. Or rather, the absence of it.

Entrepreneurship here is framed as something that convenes at five-star venues, addressed by political parties, mediated by portals, tsars, panels, and elite programmes. There is no greasy spoon. No draughty community hall. No half-empty high street unit with a hand-written sign in the window and a proprietor who has bet their savings, their health, and their family peace on “giving it a go”.

Those businesses exist in their tens of thousands. They are not scale-ups. They are not passported. They do not feature in Founders Conferences. They are, however, where most people encounter “the economy” in real life.

The manifesto talks incessantly about growth, productivity, and tax take, but says almost nothing about breakthrough. Small business appears only as a staging post—valuable mainly insofar as it might one day become something bigger, faster, and more impressive.

The entrepreneurial hero of this document is overwhelmingly a certain type: experienced, male, capitalised, confident, already inside the system. Even the accompanying film (meant to inspire) leans heavily on what might politely be described as the heritage collection of Scottish entrepreneurship.

What’s missing is modern vibrancy. Where are the women, the migrants, the creatives, the side-hustlers, the people whose first language isn’t balance sheets and whose businesses don’t map neatly onto GVA models?

Their absence matters, because it reveals who this manifesto is really for.

Despite the rhetoric of “entrepreneurs” in general, this is largely a document written by scale-ups, for scale-ups, about scale-ups. The evidence is everywhere: the obsession with portals, consolidation of agencies, laser focus, OKRs, and the repeated assertion that 0.52% of firms are the ones that matter most.

That may be economically defensible in a narrow sense – but it is culturally disastrous if you are trying to grow an entrepreneurial nation rather than simply polish an elite.

Then there’s tone.

The manifesto is permanently cross. Cross about regulation. Cross about tax. Cross about quangos. Cross about planning. Cross about apprenticeships. There is little curiosity, little humility, and almost no acknowledgment that the systems being criticised are also trying (sometimes badly) to deal with inequality, environmental limits, or long-term social cost.

Appointing a “Red Tape Tsar” sounds bold until you realise it is a very familiar trope: the strong man solution to complex, democratic messiness. There is no equivalent proposal for a Trust Tsar, or a Capability Builder, or anyone charged with widening participation rather than accelerating those already winning.

And then there is the paradox at the heart of the whole thing.

This manifesto is all the more disappointing because it comes from Sir Tom Hunter, whose philanthropic work has been consistently thoughtful, generous, and often deeply grounded in people rather than systems. The Hunter Foundation has supported young people, education, confidence, and possibility—often in precisely the places this document now seems to overlook.

That makes the manifesto not just flawed, but perplexing.

It speaks the language of “ecosystems” while narrowing the pool. It claims to listen to entrepreneurs while mostly amplifying the voices of those already at the table.

And yes, the apostrophe matters.

Because an entrepreneurs’ manifesto would have been messier, noisier, less certain. It would have included contradiction. It might have acknowledged that not everyone wants to scale, that not every business failure is a policy failure, and that economic renewal does not begin at Gleneagles but in places policymakers rarely visit.

This manifesto isn’t wrong about everything. Business rates are broken. Skills systems are creaking. Planning is glacial. But the lens is too narrow, the cast too familiar, and the imagination too constrained.

Entrepreneurship in Scotland is not just an economic lever to be pulled harder. It is a social act, a cultural practice, and often an act of quiet defiance in forgotten towns.

You won’t find much of that here. And that, more than any missing punctuation, is what gives this manifesto its oddly rootless feel.

Iain Scott writes and curates Entrepreneurship Mostly, a Substack Magazine, where the full version of this article first appeared.

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