In Davos, it was blue against red. Within minutes of Business Secretary Grant Shapps treating himself to a CBI lunch at the posh Belvedere Hotel on his plans to “broaden Britain” on Thursday, Keir Starmer took his seat in the conference center’s main hall a few hundred yards down the road.
The Labor leader showed less equality than Volodymyr Zelensky the day before, but that was not the point. The man aspiring to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had the stage he needed to make his case.
Flanked by shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, the purpose of his visit to the World Economic Forum was clear: to take advantage of the absence of Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt to show that Labor had returned to the political middle ground and was pro- business party.
The charm offensive seems to have paid off. One senior business figure said that while Sunak and Hunt were liked in British boardrooms, Labor had an industrial strategy and growth plan that the current government lacked.
The difference between the parties was evident in the speeches of Shapps and Sunak. One of the big talking points at this year’s Davos was Joe Biden’s Deflation Act, which provides broad government aid to companies investing in green technology. Starmer embraced the idea of a more active state; Shapps was decidedly cooler on the idea, describing it as “dangerous”.
A business figure said: “Rishi was in a straitjacket and took the decision not to come last year at a time when he felt unviable. Things got moving. Rishi would steal the whole show.
“Starmer and Reeves set the tone really well. They are here to promote themselves, but they have done so under the guise of promoting the UK, which fills the vacuum left by Rishi.
Over a lunch of grilled vegetables, roast chicken breast and petit fours at the Belvedere Grindelwald Hotel, Shapps insisted the UK government had a growth strategy and stressed it needed to “think bigger, take strategic risks”.
The former transport secretary used the speech to launch a plan called Scale-up Britain aimed at turning promising companies into global competitors. “What I want to create is Silicon Valley with a British edge,” he said.
Despite what he called the “overwhelming economic news,” Shapps said it was not the time to “sit back and run away from the problems of the outside world.”
Reeves was keen to stress that many of these problems were of his own making, relishing the chance to review in detail the chaos caused by former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget last September.
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“Any economic policy must be built on a scale of economic and fiscal responsibility, but the UK needs a serious plan for growth, which has been missing for a decade or more.”
Sir Martin Sorrell, a media owner and Davos veteran who was at the British business lunch, said: “He [Shapps] laid out a vision but did not lay out a clear plan.’
Sorrell said Labour’s rise “feels like a repeat of [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown” and their business charm offensive before their landslide election victory in 1997.
Asked if Labor could really claim to be the party of business, he said: “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.”
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