Highlights from Labour's Business Conference
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00:00 Hello, Rafe Blackburn, National World Politics Editor here at the Labour Party's Business
00:05 Conference at the historic Oval Cricket Ground, which you can see behind me.
00:10 And we've already had plenty of cricket jokes on the podium today.
00:15 Keir Starmer's approach to business has even been compared to baseball due to positive
00:20 engagement and apparently delivering results.
00:23 Starmer would have been delighted with those comments.
00:26 We've just heard from him in a speech just now in which the real theme, which he in fact
00:31 spoke about himself, was the difference between now with businesses paying over £1,000 a
00:36 ticket for this glitzy event and 2019 when Jeremy Corbyn was the party leader.
00:43 Starmer even mentioned this himself in his own speech, asking businesses if they would
00:48 have attended back in 2019.
00:49 And there was some laughter around the room at that.
00:53 Otherwise, Starmer went through Labour's five point plan to bring back growth.
00:57 And he said he wanted business to have its fingerprints all over the Labour Party's policy.
01:02 So quite a change from the leader there.
01:05 And that under Jeremy Corbyn five years ago.
01:09 We also heard from the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who was again bringing up the
01:13 theme that Labour wants to work closely with business and definitely doesn't see it as
01:17 a foe.
01:18 Her main announcement was that Labour would cap the 25 per cent corporation tax and not
01:24 increase it.
01:26 And she's also explained to journalists why they wouldn't be bringing back the cap on
01:32 bankers bonuses.
01:33 She said this was to give the financial sector some stability.
01:37 Now, one of Labour's policy proposals, which doesn't seem so stable, is the green prosperity
01:43 plan, which was initially going to have £28 billion of funding per year.
01:49 They're now talking about £28 billion of funding across the term of a whole parliament
01:53 if they're elected.
01:54 And even that has been cast into some doubt.
01:56 So we'll see if that gets the same stability treatment as some of the other policy proposals.
02:03 Just a reminder, you can find all of the National World's politics stories on the politics section
02:08 of our website, nationalworld.com.
02:10 And you can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter, which comes out every Sunday.
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