This country’s economy is now in serious peril. This is not only because the Government is nudging at the very outer limits of what it can raise in tax and borrowing – though it is.
It is also because that government is increasingly driven by ferocious dogma which cares little for such concerns.
It may be that some in the Cabinet can see the danger, yet others do not even view it as a danger, but as an opportunity for yet more upheaval and dramatic change.
The extraordinary developments of last week, in which the current very large Labour majority in Parliament brought about revolutions in abortion law and in assisted dying, are a warning that we are now in uncharted waters.
It may possibly be that we have never had a government whose parliamentary forces are so radical. And the uncrowned queen of those forces is the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, increasingly influential and remarkably effective in the Commons and in Whitehall.
It is true that there has always been a role for disruptive and troublemaking men and women near the top of the Labour Party.
In the Tony Blair years, a similar position was filled by the late John Prescott, a majestic steam-powered Dreadnought originating in the (now remote) days of real class war. Let nobody underestimate Lord Prescott’s considerable influence on the government he served.
But Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the apparatus of New Labour kept him under control. In this case, it looks very much as if a confident and popular Ms Rayner has slipped free of any restraint by the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner delviers a speech at Labour Party Conference in 2022
Rachel Reeves delivers her spending review to MPs in the House of Commons on June 11
Her Employment Rights Bill, which is alarming businesses all over the country, would have been strangled at birth in the days of Blairism.
The unions would have been told – rightly – that the public had grown heartily sick of their overmighty antics in the past, and did not want to see them given back the unrestrained power they had rightly lost.
And while Sir Keir and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves must know this, they seem either powerless to act, or surprisingly untroubled by the danger of it.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday last week, Ms Reeves simply evaded the question of Ms Rayner’s plans. When a successful businessman such as Sir James Dyson accuses you of being ‘vindictive’ and of ‘waging a war on aspiration’, you really ought to listen.
It is on the success of such businessmen that any future economic growth must be based. Without that growth, where are the taxes to come from to pay for the advanced welfare state in which we live?
So we must applaud the open letter to British businessmen sent out by Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, in which he does what Sir Keir and Ms Reeves will not do, and makes it plain just how dangerous Ms Rayner’s plans are.
He warns those business chiefs that they are being sleepwalked into disaster, that the Rayner Bill will fundamentally change the balance of power in workplaces, at huge cost.
Coming after the idiocy of the National Insurance increase, this a grave threat to the jobs of trade union members, as well as to the economy as a whole.
We can only hope that the Prime Minister and his Chancellor will listen and act, for the nation’s sake as well as their own.
