RUTH SUNDERLAND: Labour must listen to business

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

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

He was sent out last week to plug Labour’s supposedly wondrous plans to overhaul business rates, by charging big warehouses more – though unless and until the proposals become reality, small retailers face bigger bills.

Murray may have been expecting a smoothly choreographed PR tour, chatting to Labour-friendly shop owners when he was wheeled round Darlington, where the Treasury has a northern outpost, a few days ago.

He was soon brought down to earth by Jane and Frederic Robineau, who own a popular patisserie in the town.

They told him small business owners are ‘crying around their kitchen tables’ trying to figure out how to cope with big rises in National Insurance and the minimum wage.

The minister was perhaps fortunate the media had not turned out en masse 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 her boss Sir Keir Starmer do not want to listen to the Robineaus, perhaps they might pay heed 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 vitriolic parting shot at Labour.

Although Forte says he has quit Britain primarily because his business interests are now mainly in Italy, he accuses Reeves of a ‘disastrous budget’ and dragging us back to the 1970s. He knows many others, he says, who are leaving too.

The Budget, coupled with the relentless gloom emanating from Reeves and Starmer on the economy, has flattened entrepreneurs.

Optimism among business leaders has fallen almost as low as the record depths plumbed at the start of Covid, according to the Institute of Directors. In other words, Labour is almost as bad for business sentiment as a deadly global pandemic. Not a good look.

Before the election, Reeves and Starmer went on a charm offensive with business. They still insist they want to unleash growth, and Reeves has put forward plans such as creating local authority pension megafunds, which she claims could unlock £80billion 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 tune with the divisive, punitive and fearful atmosphere Starmer and Reeves have created, where entrepreneurs and families have been made to feel their only value to the government is as cash cows to be milked for tax.

Individuals like Angela Rayner and colourfully-coiffed former transport secretary Louise Haigh come across as overgrown student protesters rather than mature politicians. This does nothing to burnish the international credentials of UK PLC, at a time when we ought to look like a more stable business environment than the crisis-hit France and Germany.

Labour needs to ditch the naïve socialist belief that the only part of the economy that matters is the public sector and start listening to the wealth creators.

The hostility towards business is adding daily to the pall of negativity. Time to grow up and govern.