RUTH SUNDERLAND: Labor must listen to business

Every minister’s nightmare is being upstaged in front of the media by an angry member of the public.

Most people have never heard of James Murray of the Treasury, one of Rachel Reeves’ henchmen.

It was sent last week to cover up Labour’s supposedly wonderful plans to overhaul business rates, charging department stores more, although unless and until the proposals become reality, small retailers will face higher bills.

Murray may have been expecting a perfectly choreographed PR tour, chatting to pro-Labour shop owners when he was taken around Darlington, where the Treasury has a northern outpost, a few days ago.

Soon, Jane and Frederic Robineau, owners of a popular pastry shop in town, brought it down to earth.

He was told that small business owners are “crying at their kitchen table” trying to figure out how to cope with big increases in National Insurance and the minimum wage.

The minister was perhaps lucky that the media had not flocked to witness his humiliation, as the two and a half train journey from London to County Durham seemed to have deterred most.

But if his boss Reeves and his boss Sir Keir Starmer don’t want to listen to the Robineaus, perhaps they should pay attention to Sir Rocco Forte, who also runs a family business, albeit a much larger one.

Forte, as the Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday, has left the country. His departure for Rome was accompanied by a scathing farewell against the Labor Party.

Although Forte says he has left Britain mainly because his business interests are now mainly in Italy, he accuses Reeves of having a “disastrous budget” and dragging us back to the 1970s. He knows many others, he says, who are also leaving.

The budget, along with the relentless pessimism emanating from Reeves and Starmer about the economy, has crushed business owners.

Optimism among business leaders has fallen almost as low as the record levels reached at the start of Covid, according to the Institute of Directors. In other words, the Labor Party is almost as bad for business confidence as a deadly global pandemic. It doesn’t look good.

Before the election, Reeves and Starmer launched a business charm offensive. They still insist they want to unleash growth, and Reeves has put forward plans such as creating mega local authority pension funds, which she says could unlock £80bn of investment in UK infrastructure, along with reforms to boost competitiveness. in financial services.

In themselves, these ideas are sensible, but they are totally out of step with the divisive, punitive and fearful atmosphere that Starmer and Reeves have created, where business owners and families have been made to feel that their only value to the government is to be dairy cows to milk. for taxes.

Individuals like Angela Rayner and the colorfully coiffed former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh look like overgrown student protesters rather than mature politicians. This does nothing to burnish UK PLC’s international credentials, at a time when we should appear to be a more stable business environment than crisis-hit France and Germany.

Labor must abandon the naive socialist belief that the only part of the economy that matters is the public sector and start listening to the wealth creators.

Hostility towards companies adds to the blanket of negativity every day. It’s time to grow and govern.