Angela Rayner is about to launch a devastating assault on UK business.

04 Sep 2025

As Parliament returns this week, one of Labour’s priorities for this session is delivering its “back to the 1970s” legislation to bolster the power of trade unions – and their cheerleader, Angela Rayner. 

It is perhaps ironic that union members in both Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister’s own department are on strike. But that is fast becoming the new normal. And a natural consequence of reducing strike ballot thresholds and rewarding militancy with higher wage settlements. 

Advertisement Businesses look on with horror as measures never contemplated by the Blair or Brown governments are about to be enacted into law. 

Onerous powers to facilitate the recolonisation of the private sector with trade union collective bargaining. An administrative cost headwind of £5bn a year, on the Government’s own figures. The prospect of hundreds of thousands more employment tribunal cases to add to the existing backlog of half a million. And a new “fair work” quango to bring prosecutions of businesses that will be stuffed full of activist lawyers and ex-trade union officials. 

In normal times, businesses might feel that the Treasury would share concerns and advocate a sensible rethink or pause on measures that will reduce employment and lower growth.

Advertisement But these are not normal times, and in Rachel Reeves vs Rayner, it is clear who calls the shots. 

Indeed, in recent LabourList polling of Labour members, Rayner’s favourability was + 59 while that of Reeves was -26. 

So, while employment and vacancies both fall and the number of working age people on benefits increases, the Government barrels ahead with its bill for unemployment – despite many in the Treasury and the Department for Business impotently despairing. 

No wonder that, like fresher’s week friends, the useful idiots from the business community queuing up to support Labour before the last election have all melted away. Not a single business has ever endorsed all the measures in the 300-page, job-destroying, employment rights bill and the main business groups, including the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors are uncharacteristically united in seeking to oppose its worst impacts. 

The gap between what British business needs and what this punishing Government is offering them grows with each passing day. 

Instead of certainty and confidence, for the second September running, businesses face daily speculation of a horror show of potential tax raids in a Budget that does not yet have a date. 

The only thing that is certain is the uncertainty. 

The fact that the Government is clearly unwilling or incapable of cutting its spending to fit its already record levels of taxation causes consternation amongst entrepreneurs and executives. 

They see how Labour’s first year in office imposed huge headwinds on Britain’s business. 

The tone was set early with the manifesto-breaking £25bn jobs tax that punished aspiration and hit those on the lowest incomes the most. 

As we and groups like UK Hospitality and the British Retail Consortium told them, taxing jobs is one of the most destructive ways to raise revenues. 

It reduces employment, pushes people into welfare, and creates a two-tier economy – weighing down the most productive parts of the economy to support the least productive. 

We warned them not to go ahead with it but they ploughed on regardless, cheered by the large body of Left-wing backbenchers in the Labour Party who are at best indifferent to wrecking the private sector. 

And that was just the start. Breaking yet another promise, Labour’s death tax on family businesses is already impacting the incentives to grow or continue the nation’s millions of family businesses. 

This punishing change brings a small chain of family butchers, bakers or hairdressers into scope, with most having no prospect of finding the cash to pay a large and unexpected tax bill without selling the business.

Just like the tax on jobs, it will syphon money away from wages, investment and the profits which fuel growth in the UK. 

Other anti-business measures include higher business rates, imposing green packaging levies and extra tax on air travellers. 

Already announced but yet to bite are Labour’s carbon tariff, which will add to the cost of almost every imported item, higher energy costs through yoking the UK to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and an audit reform and corporate governance bill, which will be another volley of red tape and legally imposed wokery which no business ever asked for. 

No wonder that business confidence is at the lowest levels recorded since many of the surveys began. 

Ultimately, this is a government that may be in thrall to Rayner and the unions but doesn’t understand business. 

What’s worse is that it has no apparent interest in finding out what they want. 

The UK now languishes in 29th place in the ranking of global competitiveness. This is alongside the largest brain drain since the 1960s. Yet no alarm bells seem to be going off in 10 Downing Street, or the Treasury. 

While Labour may be sanguine about business failure or fall back on tropes about well-paid bosses, those who will pay the harshest price for Labour’s economic vandalism are those in “generation jobless”. 

So as term restarts, spare a thought for the growing number of young people struggling to get their first job after school or college, chasing a rapidly drying pool of vacancies thanks to Labour’s choices. 

The sad reality is Labour has never left the economy in a better state leaving government than they found it entering government, this is true all the way back to 1939, you can be sure this Labour government will keep that record in tact with astonishingly incompetent ease.