I’ve been working in public affairs for around twenty years now. When I started out, politics felt more stable. Not calm, not uncontentious, but broadly predictable. Governments lasted. Policy direction was clearer. Businesses planned on five- and ten-year horizons and expected politics to sit in the background unless they were in a heavily regulated sector.
That world has gone.
Since the financial crash in 2008, we’ve moved from one political shock to another. Brexit. Covid. Repeated fiscal crises. A revolving door of prime ministers. Markets rattled by budgets that last days rather than years. Even when governments have had large parliamentary majorities like after the 2024 General Election, that sense of stability hasn’t returned.
What’s changed isn’t just the frequency of political events, but their impact.
Politics now cuts directly across business decision-making in almost every sector. Hiring. Investment. Location. Workforce strategy. Supply chains. These are no longer decisions that can be made in isolation from political risk.
When I first came into public affairs, most of the work was about influence. You were trying to change something. A piece of legislation. A regulation. A planning decision. Success was often measured by access, relationships and outcomes in Westminster or Whitehall. That work still matters, and it still exists, but it’s no longer the whole picture.
Over time, the market has broadened both in terms of the work we do and the organisations who are engaging.
More organisations now engage with public affairs not because they want to change the law or influence a policy outcome, but because they need to understand how politics affects their operating environment. That’s true even in sectors that once considered themselves non-political. Employment policy, migration rules, tax, trade, energy costs, local government reform – all of these shape commercial reality whether you lobby or not.
As a result, public affairs has become much more strategic. Increasingly, the conversations we’re having are at board and executive level. They’re about positioning rather than persuasion. About understanding where politics is heading, where it might fracture, and what that means for long-term decisions. It’s less about winning a single argument and more about helping leaders navigate uncertainty.
That shift is exactly what we see in the work Inflect does today. More and more of our time is spent helping organisations interpret political change and factor it into strategy. Where to invest. Where to grow. Where to be cautious. How to operate in a system that no longer delivers clear, stable policy direction.
And this isn’t just a UK phenomenon.
Political fragmentation is happening across advanced economies. In the United States, politics has become more polarised and more volatile, with policy direction seemingly at the whim of the mood of the President. In Germany, the rise of the AfD reflects a breakdown in traditional party alignment and is having a material effect on policy. In France, the strength of the Rassemblement National ahead of future presidential elections underlines how fragile the centre ground has become.
These movements don’t appear out of nowhere. They sit on decades of slow or uneven growth, wage stagnation, rising living costs and job insecurity. For many people, the post-WWII economic model hasn’t delivered what it promised. Politics has responded by fragmenting. Established parties struggle to hold coalitions together. Consensus is harder to build. Stability is harder to sustain.
For organisations, this creates a very different operating environment. Political risk is no longer episodic. It’s structural. Planning becomes shorter term not because leaders lack ambition, but because the ground keeps shifting beneath them.
For a while, there was a sense that this might change. A government with a strong majority can, in theory, restore predictability. Set a clear legislative agenda. Use its numbers to deliver it. But even that assumption now looks shaky. Internal rebellions, weakened party discipline and a broader breakdown of traditional political loyalties mean majorities don’t guarantee stability in the way they once did.
So the question is whether this is temporary turbulence or something more permanent.
From where I sit, it feels like a structural change. Politics is no longer something organisations can treat as a discrete external factor. It shapes markets, workforces and investment decisions too directly for that. Public affairs, in turn, has evolved. It’s less about who you know and more about what you understand. Less about changing the system and more about navigating it.
That raises bigger questions not just for our industry, but for the political system itself. What does effective policymaking look like in an age of fragmentation? How do businesses plan when certainty is scarce? And what replaces the old assumptions about stability that underpinned public affairs for decades?
I don’t think we’re going back to the old model. The age of permanent political volatility looks like the new normal. Public affairs has already changed in response. The organisations that recognise that, and treat political insight as a core strategic capability rather than a tactical function, will be better placed to deal with what comes next.Find out more about our work
