BIG business has declared its love for Labour — and Rachel Reeves reciprocated in full today, with the shadow chancellor pledging to lead “the most pro-business Treasury” in history.
A letter to the Times signed by 120 business leaders declaring their backing for Labour said the party had “changed and wants to work with business to achieve the UK’s full economic potential.”
The signatories — including past and present bosses from Heathrow Airport, Aston Martin, JD Sports, Iceland and JP Morgan, as well as restauranteur Tom Kerridge and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — praised Labour’s “fiscal discipline,” growth plans and commitment to “working in partnership with the private sector.”
Ms Reeves, in a campaign speech today, spelled out just how far Labour has gone in appeasing big business interests.
“This changed Labour Party is today the natural party of British business,” she said, adding that Labour’s election manifesto would “bear the imprint” of business involvement.
Labour is a party that “understands business, that works with business” and would “offer a government that is pro-worker and pro-business, in the knowledge that each depends upon the success of the other.”
The shadow chancellor’s critique of the Tory record highlighted Treasury priorities, starting off with the level of taxation and the doubling of the national debt before getting on to wage stagnation and “public services on their knees.”
Almost unnecessarily, Ms Reeves claimed that she was “not one of those politicians who thinks the private sector is a dirty word, or a necessary evil.
“I know that economic growth comes from the success of businesses, large, medium and small — there is no other way,” she said.
Echoing the business letter, she pledged “a new spirit of partnership between government and business” and claimed that there was no policy “that will not be improved from engagement with business.”
All this would end up with “the most pro-growth, pro-business Treasury in our country has ever seen,” the likely next-chancellor claimed, sounding absolutely as if she meant it.
Under questioning, Ms Reeves styled herself a social democrat rather than a socialist, which was Sir Keir Starmer’s self-description at the weekend, although she is hardly recognisable as such.
Undoubtedly, Ms Reeves’s prominence in Labour’s campaign is one of the things the 120 business leaders had in mind when they declared in their letter that the party has changed.
“We should now give it the chance to change the country and lead Britain into the future.
“We are in urgent need of a new outlook to break free from the stagnation of the last decade,” they wrote.
However, the Unite union immediately demanded that Labour distance itself from one of the signatories, former Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye.
General secretary Sharon Graham accused him of being “responsible for one, if not the most brutal example, of fire and rehire during the Covid pandemic.”
He “cynically took advantage of Covid to cut workers’ wages and to boost Heathrow’s long-term profits. This wasn’t about exceptional circumstances but a cynical decision to cut wages under the cover of a heath emergency.
“The Heathrow example is why there must be a total ban on fire and rehire” to prevent any repetition, Ms Graham added.
It is unlikely, however, that Ms Reeves is bothered about the business record of Labour’s new friend.
Momentum, speaking for the Labour left, slammed the “circular logic” of her business-friendly pledges.
“Reeves this morning says her ‘plans don't require any additional tax rises’,” a spokesman said. “This exposes the lie of ‘there’s no money left’.
“They’re not making plans to scrap the two-child benefit cap, so they don’t need to raise taxes on the wealthiest accordingly.”
