A shambolic ‘business day’ at Labour Party conference reveals the government’s true feelings about the City, says Eliot Wilson
Only those addicted to Sir Keir Starmer’s own-brand Flavor Aid would claim that last week’s Labour Party conference was an unqualified success. Assessments were mixed, but it was not the joyful fiesta a new government might have anticipated 11 weeks after sweeping to a landslide election victory.
There were lots of medium-level distractions: rumbling unease at donations to senior ministers, a resolution demanding the restitution of the winter fuel payment, an opinion poll showing a collapse in Starmer’s approval rating. For many in the private sector, however, there was disappointment, dismay and some genuine anger at what the Labour Party offered for the conference’s “business day”.
The pricing was punchy: leading executives paid £3,000 a head to attend and were understandably keen to mix with new ministers from across Whitehall. The world of commerce had given Labour a sympathetic hearing in the run-up to the election, seeing in figures like Rachel Reeves, Jonathan Reynolds and Tulip Siddiq as pragmatic politicians who claimed to “get it”. This was not the Labour Party of old, the mantra repeated – and there had been wholesale, profound change. It wanted to work in partnership with business, co-operating to increase investment and achieve growth.
The event did not deliver for everyone. Some felt that watching a live stream of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speech from a different room did not justify the premium they had paid, and complained that there was little opportunity to interact with decision-makers. Instead a succession of speeches, tailored for the party faithful and for media consumption, felt like lectures. One attendee complained of being “made to queue in a bleak corridor for a drinks reception where there was no access to ministers”. Others talked of asking for a refund, and there have been questions about the value for money of similar future events.
‘Lip service’
The government is vulnerable to the accusation that it courted and flattered the business community for electoral purposes but was never sincerely engaged or in tune. “They’re in for five years and it was lip service” was one complaint to The Times. The chancellor promised an industrial strategy to be published next year and dropped hints about what might be in next month’s Budget, but there are anxieties about the likely measures in the “New Deal for Working People”. The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, is in charge of the policy which will include more rights for workers and greater duties on employers.
There is also a feeling that holding a global investment summit two weeks before the Budget makes little sense, as ministers will still be negotiating with HM Treasury and unable to make firm commitments about policy priorities.
Partly there has been a mismatch of expectations. Labour ministers, flushed with the excitement of office, realise they are no longer supplicants but in some sense patrons when they engage with the private sector. Business leaders, meanwhile, are discovering that access to government is more highly prized and jealously guarded than engagement with aspirant shadow spokesmen.
There is also a nagging feeling that the party conference format is tired and showing its limitations. What are these summits for? Are they victory laps for parties doing well, potential relaunches for those in the doldrums? Are they opportunities for the faithful footsoldiers, ordinary members and activists, to gather and share space with the leadership? Are they blue-riband networking opportunities for lobbyists of all sectors? Maybe by attempting to do everything, they in fact achieve nothing.
The jury is still out on Labour’s relationship with business. It has been more than a marriage of convenience but was never a love match: I have argued before that the party lacks a bone-deep commitment to free enterprise, and still harbours the view that private wealth is a convenient source of public revenue.
Perhaps the partners in this arranged marriage can find some sustainable modus vivendi over the next five years. But strategists in the private sector should consider the prospect of a government which is instinctively interventionist, “going steady” with the trade unions and fundamentally sceptical of the idea that free markets are the engine of economic prosperity.
President George W. Bush was famous for mangling his words, but there is wisdom in one of his malapropisms: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”
Eliot Wilson is a writer