Natacha Tannous Ritchie is a Conservative councillor in Kensington and Chelsea (Pembridge Ward) with a background in finance.

Britain’s GDP growth forecast for 2026 is lagging far behind the US at just 1.1 per cent compared with 2.2 per cent.

How can Britain possibly grow again in such a dire business environment, with its high cost of capital, high cost of energy and high cost of employment?

Whilst Keir Starmer had pledged with a straight face not to raise taxes ‘on working people’ despite imposing a £70 billion tax raid over two years and inflating the debt (reaching higher borrowing costs than under Truss’s mini-Budget), Andy Burnham has already made matters considerably worse. Britain’s long-term borrowing costs are now higher than at the peak of the Global Financial Crisis. Worse, it seems that Burnham has no plans to rescue Britain from Starmer’s doom loop of higher spending, more borrowing, higher debt-servicing costs and higher taxes to fund it all.

Instead of making tough decisions for the British people and the British economy, Burnham flirts with Corbynite notions of nationalising utilities and has decided to take Britain back to Labour’s tax-and-spend era.

This flies in the face of New Labour’s abolition of Clause IV, when Tony Blair – in order for New Labour to win after 18 years in opposition and break with Labour’s history of one-term governments – decided to modernise the Labour party and ditch the 1918 commitment to common ownership of industry.

Has government ever run a business better than the private sector?

Burnham is driving us down the road back to the 1970s, where another Chancellor Healey had to ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $3.9bn loan and led us to the Winter of Discontent where the bins overflowed, and the dead remained unburied. One of the reasons Margaret Thatcher won in 1979 was that Britain – under Labour – working.

Labour’s 2024 manifesto mentioned growth 49 times and business 61 times. Paradoxically, through their labour and energy policies, they have done everything they can to stymie entrepreneurship across the country and Burnham is poised to make matters worse, armed with neither a national mandate nor a manifesto for his 1970s-style ideas, having been elected by just 0.05% of the whole British electorate.

To date, Labour raised the minimum wage, raised employers’ National Insurance contributions (both the rate and by lowering the threshold), and introduced their job-destroying (un)Employment Rights Act, that altogether makes employers more reluctant to hire, particularly young and entry-level workers.

Moreover, in a bid to reach net zero (never mind the fact that the UK only contributes 1 per cent of global carbon emissions and that the 2024 manifesto pledged to lower energy bills), Ed Miliband has given the UK some of the highest industrial energy costs in the world. And whilst Healey speaks of the opportunities of AI, what hyperscalers would want to set up businesses here when the energy costs are so prohibitive?

In Liverpool Chancellor Healey said his ‘’ was ‘’ and added he wanted to ‘’, concluding that ‘we have to bake a bigger cake’. How contradictory is this statement, given that the Budget is widely expected to increase taxes, including an increase in Capital Gains Tax (a growth killer, which disincentivises risk taking, reinvestment and forces capital to get locked in), an increase in alcohol duty (despite hospitality being a major source of entry-level employment), and a windfall tax on banks (which would make the UK less competitive: who do Burnham and Healey think lends money to businesses, entrepreneurs and households?).

You cannot have growth without a positive credit cycle and lower borrowing costs.

Yet, despite talks of ‘fiscal discipline’ how do Burnham and Healey plan to reduce the ballooning welfare bill and address the inefficient allocation of public money?

And more importantly, how do they justify taxing working people more, and not sharing the burden with welfare recipients. Is this going to be yet another welfare budget?

Just like his namesake in the 1970s, Chancellor Healey’s policies will lead to a major employment and economic crisis. The bond market does not trust him, businesses don’t trust him, and why would they? Let’s not forget that this is the same man who stepped down as Defence Secretary, torpedoing Starmer’s government, yet now, as Chancellor, will not commit to the 3 per cent GDP defence spending he once considered a resignation matter. The shameless hypocrisy and lack of principle is staggering.

Labour policies so far have been anti-growth and anti-business, the antithesis of their 2024 manifesto.

Borrowing costs are at historic highs with the 10-year gilts reaching 5.4 per cent last Wednesday which means more money is spent servicing the debt (now almost equivalent to the combined budgets for defence and education), leaving less fiscal room. Moreover, higher business and employment costs leave less opportunity for investment and marginal hiring, weakening growth, reducing tax receipts and potentially increasing welfare expenditure.

Labour policies risk entrenching a low-growth trap and a debt crisis and Healey showed us that he lives in fiscal fantasy land when he addressed the Labour conference underscoring “Don’t tell me it’s not possible to have good growth in every postcode”.

He should start wondering why, in Labour’s third year of power, the government has worked so energetically to stop growth happening in postcode.

Meanwhile, the contrast with Labour could hardly be starker.

At Conservative Party Conference last week, Kemi Badenoch set out a distinctly right-wing agenda, combining plans to strengthen the economy with commitments to protect Britain, including the Britannia Shield, and get the country working again. Building on last year’s pledge to abolish Stamp Duty on primary residences, she promised to scrap Inheritance Tax on the family home, cut regulations that drive up building costs and pursue banking reforms intended to unlock up to £450 billion of capital for investment. This comes alongside existing commitments to reform welfare to get more people into work and to repeal Labour’s job-destroying Employment Rights Act.

Britain does not lack the potential to grow; it lacks a government willing to let it.