Perhaps we should have a list of companies that cannot be altered. As with our list of, umm, listed buildings:

His comments got me thinking. Why has the UK been able to introduce a listing system to protect buildings, but is so reluctant to use similar measures elsewhere in the economy?

Largely because it’s an insane idea.

It is indeed possible to say that certain physical things must be kept as they are. We might think that the current listed building system goes too far - Brutalism is something we’d be glad to see the back of for example, not something to preserve unless it’s as an example of what we never again let the authorities do to us - or even not far enough, but that is about physical things.

Trying to apply the same idea to businesses to be grossly guilty of reification. To treat something abstract as if it were concrete as in that Brutalist architecture.

A business isn’t though a real thing, it’s just a legal wrapper for those real things.

One example used here is Derby County, the football club. There are certain real things here. The skills of the players for example, the stadium. Properly quantifying the fans’ support would be like nailing jelly to the wall but there’s no doubt that it’s still a real thing. And yet “Derby County Football Club” isn’t a thing. It’s a wrapper, an arrangement, between those real things. As such it’s not something to be preserved, it’s something to allow to adapt to any changing relationships between those things.

This is true of Rolls Royce, Vodafone and the sweet shop on the corner. The real things are the real assets, whatever they are, and slapping a preservation order upon them may or may not be justified. To treat as rigid and worthy of preservation the relationship between these realities, the legal form of how they combine, is to entirely miss the point of what the business is.

Preserve pieces of reality by all means if that’s what floats boats, but the preservation of a particular set of contractual relationships is nonsense.