Next week’s International Investment Summit promises to be a swanky affair.
Labour has invited some of the world’s most prominent entrepreneurs and financiers to a symposium intended to show them that this country is open for business.
By persuading the rich and powerful to put their money into Britain, Sir Keir Starmer hopes to further his mission to ‘turbocharge growth’.
How ironic that it should come at a time when the business environment here is becoming less friendly by the day.
By persuading the rich and powerful to put their money into Britain, Sir Keir Starmer hopes to further his mission to ‘turbocharge growth’
Labour’s workers’ rights revolution will burden employers with extra costs and a new tangle of red tape. Here the Prime Minister speaks during a reception to celebrate Black History Month, at no 10 Downing Street on October 9
Labour’s workers’ rights revolution will burden employers with extra costs and a new tangle of red tape. These proposals are bound to dissuade firms from hiring new staff and injecting private funding.
Because many of the changes will be phased in over time, firms face being mired in damaging uncertainty for years.
The abolition of the Tories’ anti-strike laws will be a charter for union militancy, while further punitive tax rises are expected in the forthcoming Budget.
Rachel Reeves’s tax-the-rich agenda reportedly includes proposals to raise capital gains tax and squeeze North Sea oil and gas firms until the pips squeak.
She seems to view wealthy individuals and successful companies as the enemy.
Meanwhile, the PM and his Chancellor have relentlessly talked Britain’s economic prospects down ever since the election.
Question: Why, if even our own Government thinks this country is a basket case, would anyone want to invest here?
As the Tory former economic secretary Andrew Griffith and ex-investment minister Dominic Johnson incisively put it yesterday: ‘No one buys shares in a company whose CEO and CFO do nothing but whine.
’Labour’s plans will place businesses in a straitjacket of higher taxes and stultifying regulations which will inevitably crush, rather than stimulate, growth.
No amount of canapes and Dom Perignon dispensed at next week’s lavish schmoozefest can disguise that fact.
Foes of free speech
What has this country come to when an ex-Cabinet minister is unable to speak at one of our great universities because of fears over her security?
Worse still, when the threat to Suella Braverman’s safety at her alma mater comes not from terrorists but from students – supposedly among the brightest in the land.
A group calling itself Cambridge for Palestine objects to the former home secretary being allowed to speak to the university’s Conservative Association about her life and career.
The idea is so unpalatable and dangerous to these blockheads that they are prepared to resort to mob rule tactics to stop her.
Most absurdly, they refer to her as ‘far Right’ and an advocate of ‘hyper-authoritarian policies’.
Hyper-authoritarian? This from a group which supports the rights of an enclave run by Hamas, who terrorised and slaughtered their way to power in Gaza and massacred nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7.
They are lucky to live in a country where peaceful protest is a right protected by law. Under the regimes of Hamas or its sponsor Iran, it can be a capital offence.
In a sane world, the Government would be encouraging our seats of higher learning to embrace plurality of opinion.
Instead it has halted the implementation of Rishi Sunak’s new Freedom of Speech Act.In doing so, Labour has shamefully given yet more ammunition to those who seek to shut down debate.
