Healey wants to focus on the future but business is haunted by past mistakes
John Healey has a reassuring voice. If he revealed dry rot in your house or rang to tell you of suspicious activity on your account, you’d feel oddly calm about it. He’s not a gifted public speaker, but there is an ease and a glimmer of warmth that stands in stark contrast to the earnest but nervous babbling of his predecessor.
The Chancellor’s speech yesterday had been talked up for weeks, but coming after a period of dramatic activity in the bond market it was taken as an opportunity to set out the whole “vision thing” while at the same time ram home the message on fiscal credibility.
Healey also struck the tone of a teacher walking into a classroom of chaos and asking, with quiet authority, “what is going on in here?” He has discovered, during his first few weeks at the Treasury, that the UK faces a “cost of doing business crisis” – and he has vowed to do something about it. Linking the cost of living with the difficulties facing employers he said “the only way you deal with that…is growth.” If I were feeling generous I’d take him at his word and say “quite right, crack on,” but I cannot ignore the fact that we’re two years into a Labour government – a government of which he has been a senior member – and many of the most egregious costs imposed on the private sector have come from his own (former or current) cabinet colleagues.
Businesses beg Chancellor: no more tax hikes
It was, therefore, difficult to hear the Chancellor promise to take the axe to red tape without acknowledging the epic and expensive bureaucracy produced by the Employment Rights Act, for example.
He insists that growth is the answer to our current malaise but he ignores the growth-strangling agenda of the previous two years of his own party’s time in office. Instead, he paints a picture of future growth being generated by a devolution agenda that few people believe will move the dial for many years, if indeed it works at all. The British Chambers of Commerce has told Healey that any further tax increases will put the UK “on the road to ruin” – is he listening? The business group calculates that government policies have pumped up overheads by 70 per cent in a decade, and that it’s time to relieve the burden.
The Chancellor wants to focus on the future but undoing the mistakes of the past would be a good place to start.