Labour going all out to woo business with ‘prawn cocktail offensive 2.0’
Labour is accelerating meetings with leaders of Britain’s biggest companies, as it steps up its efforts to woo the City after the Conservative party’s minibudget caused economic chaos.
The diaries of Keir Starmer, his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, have been full in recent weeks with coffee meetings and dinners, as executives have clamoured to make contact with the Labour frontbench.
The move is being described as the “prawn cocktail offensive 2.0” a reference to the efforts made by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to win the backing of Britain’s financial sector during their time in opposition and the 1997 landslide victory.
The next large-scale engagement between the Labour leader and his top economic team and executives will take place in London in early December, when the party will hold its next “Labour business” event, featuring panel discussions and a lunch.
The event comes hot on the heels of a packed reception of executives and entrepreneurs at Labour’s conference in Liverpool, for which tickets sold out in record time. Starmer and Reeves were among the senior politicians to speak to an audience of more than 600 business leaders and international guests at the event.
Labour said the conference in Liverpool in September had attracted the largest attendance of companies since 2010, including a firm owned by a major Tory donor.
Since the conference, Labour has increased its lead in the polls, following the market turmoil, fall in the value of the pound and surge in government borrowing costs unleashed by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated minibudget.
Relations between the Conservatives and business leaders had struggled to recover under Boris Johnson’s premiership, after his reported “fuck business” comment in response to employers’ concerns about a hard Brexit.
Tory party infighting and the resignation of Truss have only worsened matters, in a marked change from the party’s previous self-styled stance as the party of business.
Contact from business leaders has significantly increased in recent weeks, Labour sources said, amid an ongoing transformation in the party’s relations with the City, which soured under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
The Guardian understands Labour expects to reach its target of meeting the top executives of the UK’s 250 largest listed companies by early next year.
The banks HSBC and NatWest along with professional services firm EY and multinationals such as Siemens and Nissan are among the companies to have held meetings with Labour.
The country’s biggest retailers and major employers including Tesco and Sainsbury’s have also had contact with Labour’s top team in recent weeks.
Reynolds described business as “an essential partner in building the fairer, greener Britain we all want to see”.
“We are unashamedly a pro-business, pro-worker party and it has been great to be out speaking to businesses of all sizes,” Reynolds said. “I am very grateful to the firms we have spoken to for their insight and support. Business leaders know when it comes to economic growth only Labour are on the pitch.”
Labour is understood to be increasing its engagement with smaller companies through the nationwide network of regional chambers of commerce. It is also expecting to hold more meetings with smaller firms in advance of Small Business Saturday, which takes place in early December.
A Labour source said the party and business would not always agree, but they felt the recent wave of engagement from companies showed it was now being considered a “credible alternative” by the City.