RUTH SUNDERLAND: Stop the Labor Party’s anti-Santa socialists

Rachel Reeves entered 11 Downing Street in the summer, courtesy of an electorate desperate for change.

It is no pleasure to say that she and her boss, Sir Keir Starmer, have squandered much of the goodwill that came with them into office.

A lot of energy was spent convincing businesses and the city before the election that the economy was in good hands.

It is now very difficult to find any of those who were so assiduously courted with a good word to say about the Labor Party.

Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, emulated the Chancellor on Friday by speaking in strides about how the Labor Party “inherited crumbling public services and crippled public finances, with a £22bn black hole”.

These socialist anti-Santas are not only tedious, they damage trust, particularly when they add divisive rhetoric that exalts the public sector over wealth-creating private enterprise.

As the CBI reports today, companies are expecting a sharp drop in business as we approach the New Year.

Their surveys indicate that the economy is heading toward “the worst of all worlds.” Bosses expect inflation to rise, accompanied by a reduction in production and hiring.

The City is depressed after an exodus of companies from the London stock market and a relative lack of new listings. The IPO of French media company Canal+ last week was a rare exception and even that was something of a failure.

One in three companies in the supposedly dynamic AIM market for growth companies is at risk of being acquired next year, according to brokers Peel Hunt, who predict a “swarm” of bidders attracted by rock-bottom prices.

Reeves could do something about this by heeding the clamor to scrap stamp duty on share transactions. So far it has turned a deaf ear and risks extinguishing the stock market through taxes.

She delivered a terrible budget, but she could still give us all a late Christmas present by getting rid of duty as soon as possible in 2025.

That could help reverse the trend of investors, both large and small, choosing to put their capital in the United States, not the United Kingdom.

In this regard, Sir Nigel Wilson, chairman of Canary Wharf, cites some fascinating figures.

In the early 2000s, Footsie telecommunications giant Vodafone had a market value of $210 billion, 40 times that of Apple’s $5 billion. In 2024, Apple was valued at $3.7 trillion, which is more than the entire UK economy and 160 times more than Vodafone, which is around $23 billion.

Two other US tech stars, Microsoft and Nvidia, have also been valued at around the same as the UK’s annual output at various points this year.

Sobering. But there is no inherent reason why our economy should continue to lag behind that of the United States: it performed similarly between 1955 and 2005 in terms of real wages, GDP per capita, and stock returns.

Unfortunately, the recent trend is not likely to be reversed under Reeves and Starmer.

Michael Spencer, as former treasurer of the Conservative Party, is not neutral. But it’s hard to disagree with him when he told the Mail on Sunday that this is the most socialist administration the country has ever had, by a wide margin.

The UK remains a great country with some amazing assets, including our financial services industry, life sciences, creative sector and more.

But the problem with socialists, as the old saying goes, is that sooner or later they run out of other people’s money.