Business secretary Vince Cable says the financial sector is disproportionately influential in policy circles. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. I touched on this in Amplified’s first blog post. There are important questions to be answered here about the quality of democracy and the fair representation of social and economic interests.

It is unrealistic to expect the private sector to curtail the amount of investment it makes into lobbying. What we can and should do is enrich public debate in a way that puts pressure on the policy agenda. It has not been sufficiently clear for a very long time that the financial sector or indeed any other big business stakeholder are not by default guardians of the public interest or of widely shared social goals. This has however long been an underlying assumption of political debate and policy output.

The tide seems to be turning. Nef’s Andrew Simms is pulling no punches: “This looks like full-scale mobilisation for an economic war of attrition with the finance industry on one side, and the rest of society, business and industry on the other.” This new narrative is sorely needed, belligerent though it may sound. Only a couple of years ago, Big Society guru Jesse Norman was framing social conflict in entirely different terms, personifying the state as a life-sucking force quashing all conversations: “In conversational terms, one might think of the state as the domineering bore at the table, whose loudness overwhelms the talk of others. But a better parallel might be that of the patriarch whose favourites thrive, but in whose unspeaking presence others feel robbed of air and automatically fall silent”.

When Norman was writing about this in his guide to the Big Society, anti-statism was if not the only game in town, then certainly the biggest. What the emergence of new narratives does is help ensure that the “ills” that are being addressed in policy output correspond to the values and preoccupations that best represent us a society. It may sound obvious, but variety has long been missing from the narrative palette underpinning debate, at least in its mainstream manifestations. With an obviously depleting effect on democracy. Vince Cable may have just administered some much-needed CPR.