Employers

Alistair Strathern Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I started my business at the end of my first year at university. By my third year, it was paying me more than I thought any employer sensibly would—that is, if anyone would be foolish enough to take me on in the first place—so I carried on building that business, with no business experience and no knowledge of how to do anything. I had to learn everything from scratch. Lloyds became my business bankers, and although they were supportive, the sight of the black horse on an envelope was enough to make my palms sweat from sheer stress. All it takes is for the bank to withdraw its support, and your whole business—all your hours, hopes and dreams—are gone.

The Minister is unusual in having some feeling for and understanding of private business. One of the problems is that Government Front Benchers in particular, and the parliamentary Labour party overall, do not. If you do not understand the dynamics of a business—the pressure and the reality of trying to build a business—you will not understand why people were outraged by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s remark about employers not being working people. That outrage is not fake; it is real and visceral. Their sense of disappointment in their Government is so strong. Many of them will have voted for this Government, based on their promise that growth would be the No. 1 thing, and that tax would not be put up. It sounded great in the manifesto. Those people feel betrayed by the lack of understanding and empathy for the fact that they are risking everything, including the home that they share with a spouse, who has to sign up as well. They have put all that on the line to create a business. That is the only way to create wealth. The state facilitates—through the rule of law, decent health services, education and the rest of it—but it does not deliver wealth. That can only come from the private sector, and that failure of understanding and personal experience has led to this desperate situation.

The previous Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves), made a manifesto pledge that must have been made because some public relations person told Labour, the weekend before the election, that if it did not make that pledge, it might not win, and not to be complacent: “Let’s promise not to put tax up on working people.” The Government then broke that pledge by coming up with the clever wheeze of putting tax up on employers, with no understanding of what that would do.

The arithmetic is really depressing. The £26 billion hit to the economy meant that there was not £26 billion to spend on the NHS. It turned out that the increase did not even raise the £16 billion that, according to the OBR, it should have, once the cut in corporation profits and so on was accounted for. The Government then had to compensate the public sector, which brought the figure down to £11 billion or £10 billion. Then they said, “Oh, no, hospices and GPs are not technically part of this,” so they had to find more money. Single-digit billions is all that the Government got for putting a £26 billion or £27 billion brake on the economy. It is utterly insane.

It is noticeable that smaller and smaller numbers of Labour MPs want to come to the Chamber to defend that decision. I congratulate those who have, on their party loyalty if nothing else, but when I talk to Labour colleagues outside this Chamber—if I have a chat with them in the bar, for example—I struggle to find any Labour MP who says, “That was a really good idea. That was the best way of raising money.” They will defend the need to raise money to stick into the health service, repair the “dreadful 14 years” and so on. They buy into that still, but they do not think that putting tax up on employers was a clever way of raising money, because it did not raise very much, it was an enormous brake on the economy, and it has been devastating. It has been most devastating for young people.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

indicated dissent.

[Graham Stuart]

If the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene on me, I would be delighted to let him come in.

Yesterday, the deputy governor of the Bank of England said that one of the reasons why youth unemployment has gone up faster than unemployment generally—remember, because of that gigantic brake on the economy, overall unemployment has gone up by 250,000 under this Government—was the cost of employing young people, including because of the minimum wage, the jobs tax and so on.