Just what were business leaders expecting when so many of them sucked up to Labour before the 2024 general election? Only Keir Starmer’s party, 121 of them declared in an open letter, could deliver Britain’s full economic potential. They swarmed around Rachel Reeves like drones around a queen bee. Richard Walker of Iceland even turned up to the party’s manifesto launch to praise it for its economic plans.
They are not cheering now. Only 17 of the 121 who signed the 2024 letter are currently prepared to restate their support for Labour. The rest are moaning – many of them anonymously – that they are being killed off by hikes in employers’ National Insurance and business rates, as well as the rise in the minimum wage and the Employment Rights Act. One complains of a ‘stream of anti-business policies’, while another talks of ‘consistently shit decision-making’. Well they might, and I have tremendous sympathy for any business people who find themselves in this position.
Reeves’s speeches about ‘securonomics’ were word salads signifying nothing
Except, that is, for the 121 who signed the 2024 letter. They surely knew what they were letting themselves in for. They must have known that the forthcoming Labour government was going to be made up of ministers who had spent their time in opposition spitting out the word ‘profit’ as if it were an obscenity.
Labour wasn’t hiding its intention to beef up trade union and workers’ rights. Reeves’s speeches about ‘securonomics’ were word salads signifying nothing. True, the party did suggest that it had no need to raise taxes beyond the few increases mentioned in its manifesto, such as VAT on private school fees. But it was a fair guess that as a government it would quickly cave in to the MPs, union leaders and other vested interests who were expecting a big payday after 14 years of ‘Tory austerity’, and that taxes would be jacked up to pay for this.
So why did so many businesses advocate for a Labour government regardless? They could tell that Labour was going to win – that was obvious – and they thought that by cuddling up to the party they might win themselves special favours. They thought they might win a seat at the table, or be spared some of the government’s excesses. Some hope. Instead, the government treated them with contempt like the insincere creeps they were.
Support for Labour’s manifesto in 2024 was all too typical of UK corporate culture and its craven attitude to those on the left who want to do business harm. At the same time as creeping up to Labour, many businesses were eagerly adopting woke culture. They nodded along to every daft idea that Labour activists threw at them, and for the same reason: they thought that by indulging the activists they would somehow earn themselves special attention. So we ended up with endless diversity policies, net zero policies and the like. But far from causing the activists to back off, it merely encouraged them. Many of them, after all, were avowed anti-capitalists who would never be satisfied by anything a corporation did short of dissolving itself and turning itself into a workers’ cooperative.
Let the experience of the past two years be a warning: if you are a capitalist, trying to suck up to anti-capitalists doesn’t work. Nor does doing the dirty work for a Labour party which is in the hands of the unions and the public sector and which has little regard for the private sector. Labour would have won the 2024 election regardless of support from business, but it might well have been with a smaller majority. Ordinary voters will have been swung to some extent by the sight of corporate leaders lending their support to Labour. Why, if they think it is safe to vote Labour, some will have told themselves, maybe we should too.
I fear, though, that the lesson has not been fully learned. The fact that so many aggrieved businesses only want to air their frustrations anonymously leads me to think they could be just as craven in future. If you are a business and the Labour government has done you harm, you have nothing to lose by saying it loudly and in public.
