There is a curious experiment underway in Britain. Imagine handing the cockpit of a 747 to people who have never flown so much as a paper kite, and then expressing surprise when the aircraft starts to wobble.
That, in essence, is what Labour has done with the British economy: put it in the hands of people who have never built anything from scratch, never staked their own capital, never put their own house on the line, never felt the gut-churning anxiety of making payroll at the end of the month.
Not one of the Labour front bench… not Starmer, not Reeves, not business secretaries Jonathan Reynolds or Peter Kyle, not one of their chorus, has ever run a business in the real world. Yet they presume to tell us how wealth is created. This is a government of commerce dummies with clipboards, busybodies who believe spreadsheets and slogans can substitute for experience.
And if the new Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, dares to pretend that running a charity is remotely the same as running a for-profit business, he’s deluding himself. A charity chief doesn’t face sleepless nights wondering how to make payroll or the tax bill, doesn’t put the family home on the line as collateral, doesn’t skip holidays or meals just to keep the lights on, doesn’t work 18 hour days. Real entrepreneurs do. That’s the grit of business ownership. Mr Kyle hasn’t the faintest clue. Time to wake up, buttercup.
Rachel Reeves also wears her ignorance like a badge of honour. At her conference speech in Liverpool, she gave the usual nods to “competitiveness” while keeping the guillotine raised over Britain’s wealth-creators. Another “tax raid”? She left the door wide open. And every business owner in the country heard the sound of investment screeching to an even greater halt.
We run newspapers. Regional ones. That means we hear the hum of real Britain every day… the shopkeepers, the builders, the farmers, the accountants. And I can tell you: not one of them I’ve spoken to recently approves of this government. The chorus is the same everywhere: NI hikes strangling them, endless tax rises, union-fuelled disruption, suffocating red tape. It is like trying to grow roses under a slab of concrete.
Why would anyone want to be a business owner in Britain today? Many talented entrepreneurs are now off-shoring. Others are quietly shuttering plans, shelving investment, freezing hiring. It’s not just the corner shop; it’s Deloitte, for heaven’s sake, the Big Four canary in the coal mine, slashing recruitment and hunkering down. If even the largest accounting firms are “living in fear,” what chance does a café in Newcastle or a manufacturer in Coventry have?
This is a government allergic to reality. They cannot cut public spending, it is against their faith. They cannot lower taxes, it is against their instincts. So they choose the third path: smother growth. They are presiding over a vicious cycle of lower investment, fewer jobs, higher costs, and higher prices. Retailers warn of price rises, yet Reeves shrugs and speaks of “everyone paying their fair share.” Fair share? When the goose is dead, there will be no golden eggs left to carve up.
Businesses are not bottomless pits of cash. They are fragile ecosystems, dependent on trust, confidence, and a government that at least pretends to understand enterprise. Instead, we are ruled by a cabinet of bureaucrats who confuse wealth redistribution with wealth creation. The result? Britain is becoming uninvestable.
The tragedy is that this need not be so. Britain is brimming with entrepreneurial energy: innovators, engineers, digital pioneers, exporters, but they are being throttled by a government of clipboard-carrying theorists. Until Labour grasps the simple truth that prosperity comes from encouraging risk-takers, not punishing them, the exodus will continue.
And history will record that when Britain needed leaders with vision, courage, and yes, a dash of commercial experience, it got instead a gang of amateurs, merrily driving the nation’s economy into the wall.
By Claire Bullivant
Main Image: Labour Government front bench. © House of Commons. Image licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
