Monday 31 October 2011

Labour has to be the Party of Business

Labour cannot afford to let those who hardly ever look at politics think they've gone back to their ways of being anti-business and the city and e-commerce and therefore, the UK.

I can understand the desire, indeed the need, for the party leadership to find issues that will get profile and traction in an environment where the government has an inbuilt opposition in the Lib Dems. Anything a Lib Dem says in response to a Tory pronouncement is deemed by our media to be more newsworthy than anything said by HM official opposition. This makes Ed Miliband's job even harder than leading a normal opposition. But shattering 20 years of work in challenging the prejudice that 'Labour doesn't do business' in a single speech is not worth a few headlines. Ed's conference speech if it lives on beyond the Westminster bubble, does so sadly because of its perceived anti business stance.