The financial heart of London wins Labour

LIVERPOOL, England – The UK’s main opposition Labor Party is seeking to woo the financial powerhouse of London while setting its sights on winning power in next year’s general election.

At the party conference this week, lawmakers were unanimous in emphasizing Labour’s renewed focus under leader Keir Starmer on stimulating economic growth as its top priority.

Speaking at a fringe event on Sunday, Shadow Finance Minister to the Treasury, James Murray, emphasized the party’s mission of achieving the highest growth in the G7 and engaging the private sector.

“In fact, it’s front and center of what we want to see, our number one priority – talking about wealth creation, before wealth distribution, and that’s a really important principle for Labor going into the next general election – so that framing, I think, is crucial,” Murray said. truly”.

Labor is about 20 points ahead of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives in most major opinion polls, with the ruling party battered by a series of scandals and market turmoil sparked by the disastrous “mini-budget” passed by Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss last year.

Murray targeted Truss and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in outlining how Labor will seek to restore “stability and certainty” to the country’s political system.

Murray added, “Achieving this stability and certainty is not easy. It is really important to encourage companies to invest, and to support everyone working together for economic growth.”

“I think the second really critical part of our approach is the emphasis we place on how much we work together with businesses, the private sector and private enterprise to grow the economy.”

He said the shadow Treasury team believes the path to sustainable economic growth is for the state to “create the foundations for the private sector to bring growth, bring innovation, bring competition, and rebuild wealth creation across the economy”. “

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a raft of new economic pledges aimed at stimulating growth, vowing to “rebuild Britain” if Labor wins the 2024 general election. In a confident speech to a packed auditorium in Liverpool, Reeves said Labor would stand in the election. On the economy, he said, “Change will only be achieved on the basis of iron discipline.”

This marks a marked departure from the party’s economic policy under former leader Jeremy Corbyn, which focused heavily on redistribution and was deeply unpopular with big business and the City of London.

Under Corbyn, Labor suffered its worst electoral result since 1935 in 2019, and Starmer has sought to drag the party back to the center in order to rebuild its core support in its former strongholds.

Emma Reynolds, managing director of public affairs, policy and research at TheCityUK, a lobby group for the UK’s financial and professional services sector, said the Treasury’s current shadow team had done an “excellent job of engaging business” and departed from previous leadership. “This is what companies considered, whether rightly or wrongly, to be discouraging for the private sector.”

“I think there is now more recognition that if we want, for example, to deal with climate change, it can’t just be the state spending money. A lot of that investment has to come from the private sector,” said Reynolds, a former Labor MP who He will run again in next year’s elections: “In the private sector, the role of private finance is very important.”

“I think our industry is prepared to work with any government, obviously – we’re not party politicians – but certainly if there is a Labor government, we like what we hear in terms of working in partnership.”