Today marks the beginning of London Tech Week – an endeavour which seeks to shape “the future of business through technology.”
The Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, is poised to use the occasion to “set out his vision for rebooting the economy.”
But how will he achieve such a feat, readers will ask? No, it’s not through creating a more competitive regulatory environment. No, it’s not through lowering taxes to ease the strain on businesses either. Instead, he intends to increase the state’s presence in the economy even more, pledging to take ‘aggressive’ stakes in British firms.
“You are going to see us take more risks,” he told The Times. “When it comes to aggressive ambition, this government isn’t going to sit aside from the businesses we are backing. I want that partnership to be felt in a much more meaningful way.”
You can already hear the proclamations from people up and down the country. ‘At last!’ The British people cry out, ‘more state intervention! What a breath of fresh air!’.
I joke, but the reality is that greater state intervention in the economy is neither what the British public want nor need. Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Trade and Business Secretary, put it best when he told me that the government can talk about “aggressive ambition” all they like, but that “the only ‘aggressive’ actions we’ve seen from Labour is hiking taxes, piling on employment red tape and nationalising British Steel.”
It is difficult to dispute such a diagnosis. Since Labour came into office, business and enterprise have been strangled at every opportunity. Unemployment has crept upwards since 2024, hitting 5 per cent earlier this year. The cost of hiring a full-time minimum wage worker has risen by more than £3,000, and jobs have been cut as a direct result of the government’s National Insurance hike. State intervention was sold as the magic remedy that would fix Britain’s economic woes, the cure that would rid Britain’s economy of the illness known as stagnation. Yet, it has done nothing of the kind. It has only made matters worse.
And the government’s response to this self-inflicted crisis? Yet more intervention. Take their announcement just a few months ago to launch a £1bn scheme to help tackle this rise in youth unemployment. The plan was to hand firms a £3,000 grant for taking on any young person aged 18 to 24 who has been out of work for six months.
Pat McFadden may call this a helping hand. I prefer the term state-sanctioned bribery. The state created the problem, and has resorted to bribing the private sector to help fix it.
I write all of this with what many may register to be a tone of disbelief and shock, but the truth is that none of this should come as a surprise. Tax and spend is part of Labour’s DNA. It does not matter what “pro-business” platitudes they peddle, nor what shade of red they may wear – if they can tax it, they will. The leaked WhatsApp messages between McFadden and Peter Mandelson from last week prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. If there is one sentence that captures how Labour governs, it is this:
“Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax to pay for more benefits for others’.”
Simply astonishing. How grateful we should all be to have a government so willing to make the difficult decisions.
This is exactly what happens when the state gets in the way. The economy stagnates, things go awry, and everything, for lack of a better phrase, just gets worse.
This is precisely why Kemi Badenoch’s approach to the economy is so refreshing. Whilst her political rivals all serve up interventionism in marginally different flavours, Kemi and her team have embarked on an unambiguously Thatcherite crusade that would make the Iron Lady proud. Abolishing Stamp Duty to enable home ownership. Scrapping business rates for high street businesses. A golden economic rule to restore fiscal discipline to public spending. These are not talking points thrown around for the sake of it, they are policy proposals from a party which is serious about governance, and serious about regaining the British public’s trust.
But what unites all of these proposals – and what is lacking from other parties – is the idea that wealth is created not by ministers and civil servants who lounge around in Westminster, but by the local shopkeeper in Sunderland, or the start-up founder in Oxford. Ordinary people who are willing to take risks to build something big. What Kemi and the Conservatives realise is that it is people like this who are central to Britain’s economic growth.
This is what serious economic management looks like. Not more interventionism, not more handouts – a hands-off, laissez-faire approach that gives businesses the necessary room to flourish. An approach that says ‘we trust you.’
But don’t just take the word of one Tory for it. The argument is landing with the British public. Polling consistently shows that the Conservatives are the most trusted party when it comes to managing the economy. They have taken a leaf out of Bill Clinton’s 1992 book – it’s the economy, stupid.
But partisan politics aside, the core message that readers should take away from this is that, when it comes to the economy, the state should not be welcomed with open arms. It should be treated with scepticism of the highest order. That Ronald Reagan was correct when he said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ This is something that Kemi and the Conservatives understand, and if they can hold this line until 2029, then the choice facing the British public will be as clear as day.
It will be a choice between a government that leans on the taxman at every possible opportunity, or one that says ‘we understand what Britain needs’ and steps out of the way.
I know which one I want.