Entrepreneur First’s co-founder Matt Clifford recently became a viral sensation after delivering a punchy, and very un-British, message: “We have to make the UK rich again.”

Britain had an extraordinary history of scientific discovery and invention, Clifford said, but must now act urgently to remove all the cultural, legal and institutional cruft stopping economic growth. “Almost all our other problems are downstream from stagnation,” he said in an impassioned speech at a Looking for Growth event last month. “Wealth as a nation gives us choices.”

At Entrepreneur First, Clifford said he had backed hundreds of British businesses that had collectively raised $10bn and created more than 8k jobs. But too many of these startups had chosen to move to the US where their ambitions were welcomed rather than dismissed. “We need to back our builders. Let’s fucking go!” he shouted.

Clifford’s profanely capitalist rallying cry was wildly applauded by Britain’s entrepreneurs. Loudmouth podcaster Harry Stebbings even promised to donate £100k to the “Make Matt Clifford PM” campaign. (While appreciating the applause, Clifford denied any political ambitions when I bumped into him last week.)

Even so, one certainly hopes his message hits home in Downing Street ahead of the government’s autumn budget later this month. The government has brought two impressive and straight-talking tech entrepreneurs — Jason Stockwood and Alex Depledge — into Whitehall as minister of investment and entrepreneurship adviser to the Treasury, respectively. The mandarins should listen closely to the practical advice they can offer, too.

When the Labour government was elected last year, Britain’s entrepreneurs were hopeful of positive change after the clown show staged by Tory leaders, such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

In 2023 the then opposition party published a well-meaning startup report (co-written by Depledge) promising to make Britain the best place to start and grow a business in the world. “Innovation is a great British strength,” the opposition chancellor Rachel Reeves enthused in the report’s introduction.

If that was the government’s intention in opposition, it still has a long way to go to deliver that promise in office. A poll published last week by The Entrepreneurs Network found just 3% of respondents thought the government understood the needs of entrepreneurs.

Although 69% of the 250 respondents acknowledged that Britain was an easy place to start a business, only 16% thought it was an easy place to scale one. Some 59% were optimistic about their own business, but only 8% were optimistic about the British economy as a whole. Most of their concerns focused on tax increases and the strengthening of employee rights.

Such has been the disappointment with the government that more respondents said they would vote for the populist Reform party (15%) than for the ruling Labour party (10%) if an election were held tomorrow. Even more unnervingly, 27% of entrepreneurs said they were intending to leave Britain over the next year.

The government clearly has a lot of convincing to do to win over entrepreneurs. In presenting her budget later this month, Reeves could do worse than to channel Clifford’s optimism and energy about the power of entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs may not expect much from the government, but they would appreciate it if Whitehall did not make their lives any more difficult.

Clifford helped write the government’s AI action plan and has high hopes about how technology can magnify the power of startups. At an FT event last week, he described AI as the “most pro-entrepreneur technology” of his lifetime because it enabled startups to apply machine intelligence to pretty much any sector at speed and scale and challenge the incumbents. “We are in a golden age of entrepreneurship,” he said.

The government should do far more to recognise and celebrate that fact, helping entrepreneurs to reinvigorate the British economy. As Clifford says, all other problems are downstream from stagnation.