When it comes to its relationship with private industry, Labour can’t seem to win. In the period before the New Labour adventure, the party was perceived as being anti-business, the big battalions of which wasted little love on us in return. To prove that we had changed our ways, Blair and Brown “wooed big business and acted as if they were in awe of it”, to slightly re-cast Andy Burnham’s phrase. In this critical respect the Blair-Brown journey, with the party dutifully in tow, went too far. We should have stuck with our instincts about the barons of business.
In contrast to our tentative trust in it, big business – or specifically banks – repaid Labour’s new found faith and support by stabbing it in the guts. The blade was twisted to maximum effect and placed in the hands of Labour – who were caught red-handed by the electorate still holding on to the evidence.
Subsequently, everything Labour achieved and implemented in 13 years is being unravelled before our eyes by the policies of the corrosive Tory-Lib Dem government that replaced it. From the scrapping of the child trust fund; the freezing of child benefit, cuts to the disability living allowance and the scrapping of the free primary school meals project, the list reads dramatic and seemingly endless. Even the winter fuel allowance is in the assassin’s sights. Worryingly, the accuracy of the chancellor’s aim to date has been true and his trigger-finger pulled with the cold, ruthless efficiency of a professional hit-man.
