With enterprises struggling, the Conservatives have lost their trust. Labour can now be the party of business
- Alan Johnson is a former home secretary and Labour MP
As a business minister around the turn of the century, I remember the then director general of the CBI, Digby Jones, offering me a typically forthright slab of his cracker-barrel philosophy. “The thing about you Labour guys,” he said, in his best Brummie accent, “is that you know F-all about business, so you listen and learn. The Tories think that having a couple of directorships makes them experts and so they never listen and never learn.”
The Labour party had spent most of the previous two decades in an internal struggle to free ourselves of the accusation that we had no interest in how wealth was generated, only how it was distributed. As George W Bush is believed to have said about the French, we had no word for entrepreneur.
