Labour is now seen as the party of business – rightly so

Rachel Reeves is right to say Labour is the low-tax party most trusted on the economy, writes John Rentoul

Rachel Reeves tweeted a picture of The Independent’s front page with the comment: ‘The Labour Party is pro-worker and pro-business. The Tories are neither’ (Getty)

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, admired The Independent’s front page today so much that she tweeted a picture of it with the comment: “The Labour Party is pro-worker and pro-business. The Tories are neither.”

This was a reasonable interpretation of our headline: “Hammer blow for Tories as former CBI chief declares: Labour is the party of business.” Her interpretation is backed by opinion polls finding that more people say Labour can be trusted on the economy, and that more people say that they would prefer her to manage the economy than Jeremy Hunt, the actual chancellor.

Paul Drechsler, the former CBI president whose article featured on our front page, reported a change in mood among business leaders. This is a matter not so much of hard policy as of soft attitudes. Labour doesn’t have much by way of solid policy on business (or on anything else). It has a breezy slogan about “abolishing” business rates, an unpopular tax, but it has a principle that all policies have to be paid for, so that money would have to be raised somehow.