Some of the worst culprits for the defeat of a pro-business Conservative Government were the supine journalists and management of the Financial Times.
Ostensibly, they sell themselves as the thinking man’s newspaper, focused on the economy and business. Their whole raison d’être is to be the mouthpiece of British industry, both large and small.
They have the privilege and recognition to reach out to hundreds of thousands of influencers across our nation, and yet, in the run-up to the last General Election, they urged you to vote Labour.
Now, just five months into this administration, their headlines are screaming how Rachel Reeves, the customer services lady turned economist, is destroying our economy and, as a result, crushing business growth and jobs.
Now, the Financial Times is bleating that the Starmer administration is doing untold damage to the entrepreneurial class and thousands of companies up and down our nation.
Well, we could have and did tell them that in the years and months leading up to the General Election. All socialist governments pander to the trade unions and their demands. They are their paymasters, and what they want, they get.
Not just this time, but throughout the last 100 years, whenever Labour has managed to get into office, they have pursued an agenda designed to tax as much as possible and to throw money into their own state-owned-run creations, which waste money and deliver poor services.
Let’s not forget neither Starmer nor his deputy Rayner nor Reeves nor any other Labour MP have operated a business nor created one.
None of them have taken the risk to set up a company and employ people. They are, in the main, people who have always worked in the public sector knowing that they will be paid at the end of the month no matter what they do and not having to have sleepless nights when starting up a new company and taking on the responsibilities that result.
Jeremy Hunt pursued a very difficult and yet essential path in a post-pandemic context. When you think the economy took such a battering during Covid when we had to borrow over 500 billion GBP to support every man and woman to stay at home and not work for over a year the macro-economic situation was bleak.
We are over two trillion GBP in debt with debt interest payments of over 100 billion GBP this year alone. Add in the welfare payments totalling over 250 billion GBP and the 22 million Britons who claim benefits and the financial constraints are particularly acute.
That is why Jeremy made difficult decisions but started to reduce national insurance as he was very cognizant that the only way we were going to turn the corner was by supporting businesses to reduce costs and be able to compete with countries around the world with much lower manpower costs than ours.
Increasing taxes on businesses and pouring money into public sector wages is just the start of a major decline we will witness over the next four years, both in terms of international competitiveness and economic productivity.
