The energy, ambition and innovative new ideas we need to turn Britain around is out there, it just needs to make itself heard, says Emma Revell

Last year I wrote – on these very pages – that “[o]ne of the biggest hurdles we face as a country is a fundamental misunderstanding between the people who make the money and the people who make the rules.”

I wrote those words before the general election had been called, back when Labour were bending over backwards to make friends in the City and big business was sufficiently fed up with successive Conservative governments that its members were persuaded to hear Keir Starmer out. Growth, we were told, was the primary mission and would underpin all policy decisions across the board.

It didn’t last.

Upon coming to power, Rachel Reeves pronounced herself shocked to discover a £22bn ‘black hole’ in the public finances – even though a large proportion of that supposed deficit was made up of public service pay rises that she herself signed off. She then spent the summer issuing so many alarming messages about the scale of tax hikes that might be needed that business confidence started to fall long before the hikes materialised.

At the Budget, in order to keep her promises not to raise tax on ‘working people’, Reeves decided to thump their employers instead – via National Insurance rises and inheritance tax and business........

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