LETTER: Labour is not anti-business

Nick Herbert, in his defence of Uber, rattles off all the tired Conservative clichés about the Labour Party.

I don’t wish to dwell on Uber except to point out that the company is either in dispute or banned in many countries, towns and cities worldwide.

So to claim that the London dispute is some kind of Labour plot is pure fantasy.

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What Mr Herbert’s response does demonstrate is the ideology of this Tory government: profits creamed off by a few corporate shareholders (who, incidentally, produce nothing), with meagre wage compensation and stripped-bare employment rights for the many who actually do the work.

New technology, as the Shadow Business Secretary pointed out this week, offers great opportunities but also great challenges.

Labour is building a strategy to manage that change so that the benefits are shared throughout society rather than raked in by a few speculators in the City.

Let’s be clear: Labour is not anti-business in Mr Herbert’s sense and neither is it ‘in hock’ to the unions.

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Labour will work with companies that have a clear sense of social responsibility alongside the trade unions in order to achieve a more just society, one in which food banks are not a feature of every town and one in which people who work hard are not forced to scrape by every week on a pittance. This is actually beneficial to businesses.

I was at the Labour Conference last week, proudly representing this constituency, and I can tell you there is anger out there in the country, away from the complacent world of West Sussex Toryism.

That anger is also rising here in West Sussex, as we see from the spectacular progress being made in Worthing by our superb Labour colleagues.

Labour gained by far the second largest vote in every West Sussex constituency at the general election, including here in Chichester, so you don’t have to take this nonsense from the likes of

Mr Herbert; next time, let’s show that hope defeats fear and let Labour get on with delivering a better country.