This morning, business leaders sent the first clear signal that things have stopped getting better. The economy was finally showing signs of life, and Starmer has crushed it by pursuing a misguided political strategy.

Businesses turned more cautious in August, as Labour lines up a string of tax hikes and boosts trade union power and employment rights.

In doing so, Starmer has hit business investment, destroyed confidence and made employers reluctant to take on more staff.

With terrifying clarity, today’s survey of UK business leaders by The Institute of Directors (IoD) reveals the damage Starmer and Reeves have inflicted.

It shows the sharpest decline in business investment intentions since the start of pandemic lockdowns in 2020.

Starmer’s aggressive tax hike threats are effectively locking down the UK economy all over again, by terrifying companies into submission.

IoD chief economist Anna Leach made this clear: “The newsflow in recent weeks on employment rights and Autumn tax rises has dented confidence in the environment for business in the UK.”

In just two months, Labour has destroyed the narrative that things are getting better.

Starmer sunk it all by warning the Budget “is going to be painful” with new wealth taxes and a brutal capital gains tax hike.

Reeves has been relentlessly banging on about her £22billion budget black hole.

And deputy PM Angela Rayner is lining up a raft of measures that will boost workers’ rights, which businesses fear will raise the cost of hiring staff and slash productivity.

This is doing real damage to business morale. “It’s disappointing to see last month’s welcome uptick in business leader confidence snuffed out over the summer,” Leach said.

The IoD survey shows that staff headcount expectations are plunging at the fastest rate since the first pandemic lockdown.

Business investment is plunging too.

Investment and employment are the two things that UK needs most, and Starmer has trashed them in just two months for purely selfish reasons.

Starmer has been relentlessly spreading gloom so he can blame the Tories

But this is backfiring horribly. It will damage Labour as well as the rest of us.

After years of Tory ineptitude, things were slowing starting to improve. Most ordinary people won’t have noticed yet, because economic data takes time to feed into daily living standards.

But here are eight reasons why the economy is picking up. Or was, before Starmer and Reeves went to work.

Starmer is returning us to the lockdown nightmare of 2020, and there isn’t even a pandemic.

Labour needs to wake up. It isn’t a protest movement anymore. It’s the’ government. Starmer should be talking up the UK economy, not talking it down. His words are having an impact in the real world, as we’ve seen today.

The recovery is over. Starmer killed it. And faster than its critics could have imagined.