Labour and business

How far Labour has gone along the path to a relationship with big business was prefigured by Private Eye magazine last month. 

While it's no surprise the Tories are happy to schmooze with Serco, until fairly recently Labour was trashing the firm. In 2021 deputy leader Angela Rayner demanded to know "why Serco and other outsourcing companies are being rewarded for their failure", while shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves condemned services such as Covid Test & Trace "being outsourced to a large private company like Serco, which has a poor track record and know links to the Conservative party".

Serco isn't the only government-friendly company to sense which way the wind is blowing ahead of the next election. Reed In Partnership (the privatisation arm of recruitment firm Reed Group) and consultancy KPMG  have jointly paid for a meeting at the Labour conference to discuss "great government in the 2020s: how will Labour fix our public services?" Reed and KPMG paid the IPPR think-tank to arrange the meeting. While IPPR does have events at the Conservative conference, there's no matching Tory meeting funded by these two firms.

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Meanwhile Northrop Grumman, one of the world's biggest arms manufacturers, also appears to be concentrating its fire on Labour. The US arms giant paid the New Statesman to arrange a Labour fringe meeting on how to safeguard national security post-Ukraine.

The firm does not appear to have arranged a similar meeting at the Tory conference

Further:

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves' guarantees in a Sunday Telegraph interview not to raise the higher rate tax band (as her boss Sir Keir Starmer had promised) or to levy wealth taxes (as Reeves had proposed as an alternative to Rishi Sunak's 2021 national insurance "tax on jobs" hike) will have been music to the ears not just of the paper's readers but to the moneybags backers paying the salaries of Reeves' staff as they work out how to fund a future Labour government.

Sir Victor Blank, the former chairman of Lloyds TSB who agreed to the disastrous takeover of HBOS in 2009 to help then prime minister Gordon Brown out of a hole, has been making quarterly donations to Reeves' office for a couple of years, amounting to £175,000 up to March this year (after a long Corbyn-era gap in his giving). As a proven banker, he will doubtless have appreciated Reeves' pitch to Telegraph readers that "I'm very much in favour of wealth creation".

Also generous to the probable next chancellor is Lord (David) Sainsbury, scion of the supermarket family. 

There was confirmation of the trend in the Liverpool Echo's report of the first full day of Labour conference.

Big business is welcome here

We have known this for a while, but Labour wants to be the party of business. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has spent a lot of time working to charm the City - and it shows.

Big firms have come to the conference in their droves. Walk around the conference exhibition and you will spot the stalls of huge firms nestled alongside unions and charities.

Barclays, Google and Ineos all have stalls, while Sainsbury's had a Scalextric track that was catching the eye of many people as they walked by. As it looks set to inherit an economy in ill health, the party is happily entertaining private firms.

That attitude was on show in a fringe event called 'Rebuilding our Industrial Strength'. Speaking on the panel, former Secretary of State Peter Mandelson said that if the party enters government then it will be "private investors on whom we are going to rely" to build the economy.

One can understand that Labour does not want to antagonise big business with whom, let us be realistic, any democratically-elected government has to work. Also, campaign contributions from commerce are welcome jam to add the bread-and-butter of TU funding.

But the British electorate does not want to kick out of government a set of blue Tories merely to replace them with pale pink Tories. Blair-Brown was rightly condemned for unthinkingly taking on the basic Thatcherite philosophy, and they did at least have a trade union heavyweight in the form of John Prescott at the top table. Sir Keir and his colleagues in the Labour leadership currently do not have a similar figure to keep them in touch with Labour's roots. 

The message will no doubt change once funds have been secured, the election date confirmed and the long campaign started in earnest. Any party which aims to overcome the feeling on the doorsteps that "you're all the same" is going to have to work exceedingly hard. One also trusts that Starmer and Reeves have not made any unconditional promises that run counter to a programme of social justice.