'Labour and business is odd combo - like vodka and tomato or Crouch and Clancy'

10 February 2024 , 19:17

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The UK has had 14 years of the Fat Cat pulling its purse strings

Labour and business is one of those odd combinations – vodka and tomato juice, socks and sandals, Crouch and Clancy – that it’s tough to get your head around. In my admittedly simple view of the world, Labour should not necessarily be anti-business but should be blatantly on the side of the worker rather than the boss. Fair wages, no zero-hour contracts, that sort of thing. When you see Labour going down well with the City, austerity hero George Osborne praising them, it’s a slightly unsettling feeling. Turns out it’s not just me. It used to be you had to wait ages to see how policy was playing out. Now you can get reaction pretty quickly.

It was said it would take 50 years after a head of state left office to properly assess their legacy. Much faster now – it took about 45 minutes to work out what Liz Truss had left us with. Savanta released some polling pretty quickly after Labour’s Business Conference had finished. Just one in five of the public backed taking the cap off bankers’ bonuses, there’s apathy around keeping corporation tax the same and experts reckon there is a danger Labour are not being seen as doing anything radical on the economy as a whole.

Chris Hopkins, from Savanta, said: “We can see Labour have successfully made the case that they are not a risk to the British public. That may well be enough to see them into government. “But there remains a desire for a less cautious approach which is yet to be ­realised.” Problem being, it’s a genuine tightrope, and when you start threatening the interests of business, they snap back pretty hard. For example, the CBI has already called for Labour to water down its proposals on workers’ rights, and off-shore energy people say any windfall tax on their profits will cost tens of thousands of jobs.

Mr Starmer needs to hold his nerve. Courting business is fair enough but letting them dictate how Labour will govern is another matter. We’ve had 14 years of ­fatcats pulling the strings. Anyways, more concrete for Mr Starmer is the furore around the £28billion green investment pledge U-turn. Not popular, although the party dealt with it well. But it plays into a rapidly forming Tory slur about flip-flopping.

Not the most horrifying Tory attack line this week. That was at PMQs, when Mr Sunak made a trans rights jibe. An insider said: “It was terrible but the really, truly, shocking thing is how shocked people were.” This line will be used again and this will all get uglier. What we’ve seen, to quote Cormac McCarthy, will be “nothing compared to what was comin down the pike”...

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