Labour is aggressively pro-business, says Tristram Hunt
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/08/labour-aggressively-pro-business-tristram-hunt Version 0 of 1. A Labour frontbencher has said the party is “aggressively pro-business”, as the opposition faced further criticism that it was hostile to the private sector. Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show that Labour was a “furiously, passionately, aggressively pro-business” party. Last Monday, Ed Miliband dismissed a warning from the Boots chief executive, Stefano Pessina, of a potential “catastrophe” for the country if Labour wins in May. On Sunday, there were further attacks on Labour’s relationship with the private sector, with David Cameron claiming the opposition had a “sneering hatred of business”. However, Hunt said Labour was on the side of Britain’s businessmen and women. He said: “I’m enormously enthusiastic about businessmen and women making money, about delivering shareholder return, about making profit, not least because that will help to support the Sure Start children’s centres and the schools. “We have heard from some businesspeople. We have got 5 million great businesses working really hard across Great Britain, making money, as I say, and Labour is on their side. What is the problem our economy faces? It is a productivity challenge and that means the state has to play its role alongside business. “What is the challenge for our business as well? It is markets. Only the Labour party is committed to ensuring we have got a successful UK working in Europe delivering those markets for modern British business. So we are a furiously, passionately, aggressively pro-business party.” The prime minister tried to maintain the momentum of the attack, writing in the Sunday Telegraph: “This chaos [within Labour] betrays something much deeper about Ed Miliband and Labour – something that should strike fear in every family in the country: they have a sneering hatred of business. “It was Ed Miliband, in one of his first major speeches as Labour leader, who took it upon himself to dub some businesses as ‘predators’. It was Ed Balls who said that one of the first things he would do as chancellor would be to slap higher corporation tax on some of our biggest employers.” Three more former business allies of Labour have distanced themselves from Miliband. The Sunday Times reported that Chris Wright, founder of the music publishing firm Chrysalis, who backed Labour in the 2005 election, said the party risked stoking the politics of envy. Lord Haskins, a former party donor who ran Northern Foods, said Miliband had failed to capitalise on his party’s pro-European stance with entrepreneurs. Robert Senior, the head of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which ran Labour’s 2010 election campaign, told the Sunday Telegraph that Labour was “a very different beast” now and his firm would be focusing on other work. On Thursday, the long-term Labour donor Lord Noon told the Guardian that Miliband and Balls had given the impression that the party was not focused on business or the economy. Sir Charles Dunstone, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, said businesspeople felt “very detached” from Labour and “isolated”. Miliband has been promised the full co-operation of Tony Blair during the general election campaign, as his party maintained a slim poll lead in spite of the high-profile spats. The former prime minister, who led the party to three consecutive general election wins, “will do whatever the party wants” to help secure victory in May, his office told the Observer. Two of Blair’s close New Labour allies, Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, countered claims that they had taken soundings from a potential replacement leader at the height of a plot to depose Miliband. The sustained attacks from business leaders appear, however, to have done nothing to dent Labour’s popularity. A poll for the Observer showed the opposition up one point from a fortnight ago on 34%, two ahead of the Conservatives, unchanged on 32%. Ukip dropped three points to 15% in the Opinium research while the Greens and the Liberal Democrats both moved up two points to 8% and 7% respectively. Miliband remained significantly less well regarded than Cameron, with a satisfaction score of minus 26 to the PM’s minus five. Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour, said Miliband “will make a very good prime minister” and suggested corporate leaders “will become much more reassured” about the opposition’s stance by the time of the general election in May. The peer accepted that more needed to be done to counter the impression being created but said the criticism was a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the party’s position. “We’ve got two months to show that [Miliband] can make the case,” he said. “I believe he has, but I believe there is a determination also to portray him in a very negative way.” He and Campbell contacted Alan Johnson over speculation that he was being lined up by MPs seeking to oust Miliband. But both countered a claim in the Financial Times that they “took soundings to see whether he was prepared to take over”, insisting that they did nothing more than ascertain from a friend that the rumours he was being lined up were untrue. |