Labour's class war approach to business

Stephen Pollard has a useful CAPX piece on Labour's failure to venture beyond its traditional class war approach to business. 


Labour’s mangled sixth-form-level Marxist class war

• Labour MP Emma Reynolds told GB News she doesn't think employers are working people
• It's clear that, even as a Treasury minister at the heart of economic policy, she holds 19th century Marxist views about employers
• The misunderstanding of what business owners and landlords do, will discourage investors and lower available rental properties

Emma Reynolds, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is one of the more sensible Labour MPs. She resigned as a front bencher when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader and is firmly in the moderate wing of the Labour Party.

Which is why her comment yesterday that ‘I don’t think employers are working people’ is all the more revealing – and all the more telling about the attitude of the government. Plainly, my description of Reynolds as one of the more sensible Labour MPs is relative. When even someone as relatively sensible as Reynolds believes that employers are a class that don’t work for a living but somehow live off the backs of ‘working people’ then it shows the scale of Labour’s inability to grasp even the basics of wealth creation and growth – and thus the scale of the problem for our economy.


The whole piece is quite short and well worth reading as another reminder that Labour does not intend to base its voter appeal on an enlightened approach to small and medium-sized businesses.


Reynolds is no Marxist. But it’s damning of both her and Labour more generally that such a crude Marxist analysis of employers and employees drives their thinking, with no understanding of the nature of small and medium-sized businesses and how hard most employers work to create wealth and employment for their fellow working people. As one poster on social media put it: ‘It’s 7:41 on a Sunday, and I’m at my desk – guess I’m not a working person. My employees are not doing the same, I can tell you that (and I don’t expect or want them to!)’