Andrew Griffith is Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade and is himself a former business executive for more than 25 years before entering Parliament in 2019.
Everyone in Westminster is holding their breath for this week’s Spending Review.
After two botched Budgets which quickly saw her headroom evaporate, Rachel Reeves must be hoping Keir Starmer is not a fan of ‘three strikes and out’.
The one thing that will remain thin on the ground this week is economic growth.
Public spending – politicians taking money off taxpayers and deciding for them where to spend it – is Labour’s stock in trade but we Conservatives know the only truly sustainable growth comes from the private sector.
In fact, the way back for our Party is by championing the interests of the smallest businesses and self-employed.
The millions whose values are aspiration, hard work and self-reliance. And who take risks which benefit us all.
Unlike many, business is one of those clear ‘wedge’ issues which we Conservatives can wholly ‘own’. A policy commission in my portfolio is on precisely how we create and support a new generation of entrepreneurs and those who work for them in small businesses. Taking a proper chainsaw to red tape and looking at business taxes but with credible plans of what, where and when – not just another manifesto promise followed by doing the opposite.
By contrast Labour do not understand or value business.
There are more people round the cabinet table to have falsified their CV’s than there are with real experience of business. No wonder last week Labour had to cancel a planned business event due to lack of demand to meet with ministers. Fooled once by lies of being ‘pro-business’ in the run up to the election, bosses aren’t going to fall for it again. Indeed, pressed at the recent CBI Dinner, the Chancellor declined four times to rule out raising business taxes even further.
As Shadow Business Secretary, I had not expected the Labour ‘love in’ to sour quite so fast. But opposition to the extraordinary ill-judged £25 billion jobs tax reached those parts of the economy which politics does not normally reach. When you tax something you get less of it. And unsurprisingly the combination of rises in the state determined minimum wage plus reduced thresholds at which national insurance becomes payable have hit employment in sectors like hospitality and retail for six. A ‘triple whammy’ of hurting those on the foot of the jobs ladder, hitting firms and damaging our high streets.
So much for no plans to raise taxes on workers.
Yet still Labour press on, ramming through Angela Rayner’s 300 page, trade union authored, ‘Bill for Unemployment’ – a zombie love child of Mick Lynch and Jacques Delors containing without exaggeration, every left wing unionists’ fantasy from the last forty years.
Every Labour government leaves office with unemployment higher. This one is actually legislating for it!
Consider a small sub-set of the Bill for Unemployment’s contents: The right for an unlimited number of trade unions officials to enter private business premises, company IT systems or dictate that firms gather their employees for a recruitment ‘fishing expedition’ meeting. Yup.
Vastly lowering thresholds for union recognition so that trade unions can recolonise the private sector on the back of a request from just two in a hundred staff. Tick.
Removal of a trade union regulator, shorter notice strikes and fewer controls on workers opting in to the political funds. Yes again.
And a New government funded ‘Fair Work Agency’, stuffed with lawfare agitators, able to bring cases against firms even where not a single employee has raised a complaint. That too.
No wonder that independent research from the Institute of Directors last week revealed that over seven in 10 (72 per cent) business leaders believe it will have a negative impact on UK economic growth, half reported that they will be less likely to hire new staff, and a quarter said they will be more likely to make redundancies.
Third, the family business death tax.
The well-justified discontent of farmers is well known but in precisely the same way, family businesses are on the receiving end of Labour’s vindictive scrapping of Business Property Relief. There are 9 million family businesses in the UK — indeed, 93 per cent of firms in this country are family owned. One million of them are employers, and altogether they turn over £2.8 trillion (yes, trillion with a T) and account for 50 percent of the private sector. Disproportionately, they are the economic heart of their communities and unlike multinationals they are vested in the success of our country. All are being put at risk. We now know it can’t be because it raises money — because it won’t – and it will actively harm growth.
A report produced by Family Business UK shows that rather than raising revenue for the Treasury, scrapping BPR will cost it £1.3 billion over a five-year period. It will also cost 200,000 jobs and shrink the economy by £15 billion.
And to illustrate how flawed this policy is – it does not apply to overseas businesses operating here, to those owned by private equity or foreign owners.
The message from this Government to anyone willing to put their capital, time and energy on the line by taking risk to create wealth for their family is abundantly clear: Don’t bother. Don’t even try. This Government does not want you to succeed.
Labour have stolen the futures from a generation of entrepreneurs on the back of hooky maths and broken election promises. As socialism continually fails to appreciate, you don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.
Whilst the whole policy renewal process – and the concrete plans to deliver policies in government – will rightly take some time, it is a myth that we Conservatives have not already made some policy commitments. Amongst these, I can confirm that we will scrap the Family Business death tax in the very first budget of the next Conservative government.
At this point, or in comments below, readers usually observe the track record of Conservatives in government.
We must acknowledge mistakes as well as many of the good things that we did.
It was wrong to raise taxes and levies on business whilst presiding over record amounts of largely unreformed welfare spending. We failed to stand up vigorously enough to Whitehall inertia and legal overreach frustrating what people voted for. We didn’t overrule elected mayors and devolved governments when they sabotaged our plans to build, and we did pile on new regulations on everything from Premier League football to television adverts for porridge oats.
As Kemi has said, too often we talked right and governed left. But the Conservative Party is now under new management. That era is over and as a means of growing our economy to make everyone better off, we are unafraid to have the backs of wealth creators and risk takers.
We have a positive vision for Britain’s businesses, where we drive growth and rip out the red tape that throttle innovation and investment. A rewiring of the state, the economy and the regulations that underpin them. Our strengths as a nation will survive even this terrible government: the rule of law, science and research, depth of financial market capabilities and our English language all remain sources of enduring advantage. Billions of people feel an affinity towards our country and the world still wants what we make – and it wants our skills, knowledge and experience too.
Whilst other parties compete about how to expand the state even more, we will create a country where through lower taxes and fewer regulations, we can re-ignite the spark of everyone’s ambition.
