Conservative business policies - meat on the bones

Published : October 09, 2009

The Conservatives arrived for their conference in Manchester in the best heart they have been in for at least two decades. They are looking forward to ending their long sojurn in opposition and increasingly look like a Government in waiting. On Monday George Osborne earned plaudits for a deliberately downbeat speech (although it would have been hard to give a positive one) on the economy and the state of the public finances. The Conservative’s Business Team, led by Ken Clarke, addressed the Conference the following day. Mark Prisk, Clarke’s Deputy, introduced the session which fell into three parts:

Firstly, three business people were interviewed on a sofa set, with Prisk acting as a sort of daytime TV host (a role he performed very well, Ken Clarke joked that he had a career ready for him if politics didn’t work out). These events are often cringingly embarassing, but this one, featuring Charlie Mayfield (CEO of John Lewis), Doug Richard (of Dragons Den fame) and Shaa Wasmund (an internet entrepreneur) was well handled and got the key points that they wanted to make, about the burden of regulation, across well.

Secondly, each of the junior Shadow Ministers got two minutes to make some quick points. Prisk had the meatiest messages; that the Conservatives would cut corporation tax – from 28p to 25p and 22p to 20p for large and small business respectively - and that they would give start-ups a two year payroll tax holiday for the first ten employees (something George Osborne announced the previous day). Adam Afriye spoke about exempting hi-tech businesses from regulation. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown spoke about benchmarking UKTI’s performance and stopping RDAs from engaging in beggar-my-neighbour trade promotion. Johnathon Djanogly pledged to hold the Agency Workers Directive at bay. John Penrose spoke about the report into deregulation which he’d published that morning. The lines he focussed on were so called ‘sunset clauses’ which would abolish Quangos that have outlived their usefulness, a ‘one in, one out’ rule for new laws and a system of public votes to identify Britain’s most hated regulations and scrap them.

It was of course impossible, in two-minute mini-speeches, for the shadow ministers to go into much detail about the policies or explain how they might be funded. The tax cuts announced by Mark Prisk in particular will have to be paid for and if, as is widely expected, the funding has to come from within the Business budget, cuts could be made to some cherished programmes.

The Third segment was Ken Clarke’s speech. Clarke is probably the Party’s best platform performer and his speech went down well in the Hall. He concentrated his fire on Labour with some good lines about Lord Mandelson. But it wasn’t a hatchet job on the man the Tories refer to (sometimes still with a little bit of fear in their voices) as the Prince of Darkness. His general line of attack was that Mandelson was often right but that: a) he lacked the wherewithal to do what he said he wanted to do – and he gave the part privatisation of the Royal Mail as an example; and b) that he was undermining himself by backing Brown. His best received line was “Peter, why did you save Gordon Brown for the Nation? The Nation is not grateful”.

The webcast of the whole session is available here.

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