Business feels that Labour has failed them, Alastair Campbell has told one of the party’s key pressure groups.
In the wake of Rachel Reeves’ national insurance hike on employers, the inheritance tax raid on farmers and other reforms, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor said that of 300 business people at a recent event, the overwhelming majority told him Labour was performing “worse than expected.”
And one of the major reasons was “disappointment on the much vaunted “reset” with Europe,” he warned.
In his lecture to Labour Movement for Europe he also hit out at Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, saying facts were the way to take on the Brexiteers’ arguments, as he extolled the Independent’s recent front page setting out the true cost of Brexit.
In his speech, he said: “That Labour needs to win over the business community, or perhaps that should be “re-win over”, is not in doubt.
“I did an event last week, 300 business people, and asked them, on a show of hands, whether the Labour government was A) performing as expected; B) better than expected, or C) worse than expected … my exercise had zero hands raised for “better than expected”, around 20 per cent “as expected” but an overwhelming majority “worse than expected.”
He also warned Labour that it has to “stop debating Brexit on your opponents’ terms”.
The party should “stop being so defensive about spelling out the facts, the scale of the disaster that the Brexit deal inflicted on us,” he said.
Labour politicians also had to “stop treating Nigel Farage like some exotic celebrity who manages to play the media like a fiddle… treat him like a politician, take apart his arguments, expose his record, show that beneath the bonhomie and the bluster is an agenda that would take this country in a dark and dangerous direction.”
He also urged the group to “memorise (and) never tire of using” the facts of Brexit set out by The Independent on the fifth anniversary of Brexit.
He told them that these included “the £30bn divorce settlement; the 15 per cent long term hit on trade, as assessed by the Office for Budget Responsibility; the £27bn drop in exports attributed to new Brexit trade barriers; the 118,000 tonnes fall in seafood exports since 2019; the 16,400 businesses, some of whom may well have bought the idea Brexit would mean less not more red tape, which have just given up on exporting to the EU because of the bureaucracy… and – remember “take back control” – the 2.3million net migration into the UK since EU free movement ended.”
The Brexit deal to leave the EU was now something that “only (Boris) Johnson and (ex-Brexit secretary Lord) Frost are left defending”, he said.
