Last night, the Chancellor stood in the grand surroundings of Mansion House and delivered one of the most absurd lines I’ve ever heard from a senior politician. Let’s hear it in full: “In too many areas, regulation still acts as a boot on the neck of businesses, choking off the enterprise and innovation that is the lifeblood of growth.”
Has she no self-awareness? Nobody has stamped harder on British business than Rachel Reeves herself – hiking employer national insurance, launching inheritance tax raids on family firms, and fuelling fears of still more tax hikes in the autumn.
Yet here she is, pretending she’s going to swoop in and rescue British enterprise from the regulators.
Reeves urged watchdogs to show “boldness” and resist “excessive caution”. Coming from anyone else, fine. But this is the woman who’s been draining the life out of the economy since day one.
She’s administered the poison pill. Now she wants us to believe she’s its saviour.
But Reeves isn’t the only problem. Labour’s crass and talentless front bench also features Deputy PM Angela Rayner, who’s marching her big bossy boots all over business and loving it too.
Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill will strangle firms in a fresh spool of red tape just as Reeves claims she’s cutting it.
It’s being dubbed a “stealth tax” on employers, that will cut profits, waste time and fuel strikes, costing businesses up to £5billion a year.
It will also make recruitment riskier and expose firms to a wave of vexatious tribunal claims. Employees who will pay the price, through fewer jobs and lower wages.
In April, Britain’s five biggest business groups warned the Bill could derail the UK’s already fragile recovery. And Rayner is pushing this at the same time as Reeves give us a load of guff about cutting red tape.
This is economic suicide.
In her speech, Reeves also called for more risk-taking in the City to reignite the economy, urging banks to push cautious savers into the stock market.
There’s even talk of reviving the 1980s-style ‘Tell Sid’ campaign to get people investing again.
She’s loosening mortgage lending rules too, risking young people’s homes in a desperate scramble for growth.
Then come the autumn, she’s almost certain to hit us with another £30billion of Budget tax hikes, crushing the recovery she’s trying to engineer.
Even the Office for Budget Responsibility warned yesterday that she can’t raise taxes much further without choking off growth altogether.
This confused and deluded government is pulling in two directions at once. Reeves talks about growth while preparing to hammer it. Rayner claims to support working people while making it harder for employers to hire them.
And I haven’t even mentioned Ed Miliband, who’s trying to save the planet by destroying the UK economy.
A few months ago, I labelled these three Labour’s economic suicide squad, along with self-immolating PM Keir Starmer. They’re still active, they’re even more dangerous, and they’re taking us all down with them.
