Kemi Badenoch has accused the Labour government of driving Britain’s wealth creators abroad, and called for the ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences to be lifted and the Energy Profits Levy to be scrapped. The Conservative leader set out the demands in a newspaper comment piece.

Her intervention followed remarks by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder of the petrochemicals group Ineos and co-owner of Manchester United, who said yesterday that he had lost confidence in Britain. Badenoch wrote that Ratcliffe was once handing the Exchequer more than £100m a year.

Fred Done, the betting billionaire whom Badenoch described as the UK’s biggest taxpayer, said he would leave the country if he were not so old, and that he had “never felt so gloomy” about the outlook for the UK since opening his first bookmaker’s in Salford in 1967.

Badenoch said the pensions minister, Torsten Bell, had responded to Ratcliffe by saying he was not a patriot. She called the response crass.

She pointed to the hedge fund founder Chris Rokos, who she said moved his tax residency to Greece this month. “Labour can dislike billionaires as much as it likes,” she wrote, adding that when a man paying £330m a year in tax leaves Britain, “the Treasury doesn’t stop needing £330million”.

Badenoch said the shortfall would be met by everyone else, and that ministers were now floating wealth taxes and mansion taxes aimed at middle-class families and their homes. She said Andy Burnham had gathered entrepreneurs in Downing Street days ago and promised that his government would be a “partner for growth”.

Badenoch said Ratcliffe had criticised Britain for importing energy unnecessarily, attacked North Sea taxation and raised concerns about gas storage, describing the failure to exploit domestic resources as “insanity”. She said the government’s response was that it remained “confident” about supply.

She said Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, had been badly damaged by drone attacks, and that Houthi attacks threatened shipping routes into the Red Sea. British families and businesses could see that another shock to energy bills was coming, she wrote.

British industry was carrying some of the highest electricity bills in the world, Badenoch said, while the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields sat ready to drill. She said both had been signed off under the Conservatives and that Sir Keir Starmer and then Burnham had dithered for more than two years.

The Energy Profits Levy she wants scrapped stands at 38 per cent on top of ring fence corporation tax and the supplementary charge, and is due to run until 31 March 2030, according to the House of Commons Library.

Ratcliffe has previously backed Conservative plans to scrap carbon taxes, arguing that they damage British industrial competitiveness.

Badenoch said almost a million young people in Britain were not in education, employment or training, and blamed Labour tax rises and regulation rather than Conservative school reforms. Office for National Statistics figures published on 27 August put the number of 16 to 24 year olds in the UK who were NEET at 981,000 between April and June 2026, up 30,000 on a year earlier.

She said the government’s political proposition was that difficult choices could be avoided, citing Burnham’s statement that “national security cannot come at the expense of social security” and the decision to offer employment support rather than cut welfare.

Badenoch said her shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, had more private sector experience than the whole Labour frontbench combined, including as a FTSE 100 finance director, and that her economic team was devising policies intended to create jobs and persuade investors that Britain was worth backing.

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Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

The Labour Party chair has said Sir Jim Ratcliffe loses “the moral high ground” by making statements about the UK while living in tax exile.

Speaking to Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Bridget Phillipson said she would take the billionaire businessman’s comments that the UK was “on the slide” with a “pinch of salt”.

Sir Jim, the founder of petrochemical giant Ineos and Manchester United’s co-owner, told the BBC he has lost confidence in the UK due to a combination of high taxes and high immigration.

He has been a tax resident in Monaco since 2020 and said “things would have to get better” in the UK for him to return.

When questioned over the remarks, Phillipson said Sir Jim loses “the moral high ground” by “making these kinds of pronouncements while choosing to make decisions, that he is within his rights to make, to become a tax exile”.

Pushed on whether it bothers her that people who create jobs and pay a lot of tax were leaving the UK, the minister said she was “optimistic about our country’s prospects”.

Other high profile billionaires have left the UK, including including steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal and most recently the UK’s third biggest taxpayer, hedge-fund boss Chris Rokos.

But, Philipson argued the country was in a good position ahead of the Budget next month, and Andy Burnham has shown a “sense of hope and optimism whilst recognising that many families are still struggling and there is more to do.”

“Of course, there are challenges, including big international headwinds, but I fundamentally believe that we are in a strong position going into this budget because of the decisions taken over the last two years, and I believe our country’s best days lie ahead of us,” she said.

Philipson declined to speculate over whether there would be tax rises in the Budget on 28 October, and said the government remained committed to being disciplined about its spending rules.

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper has warned the UK’s economic growth is being held back by a “computer says no” approach.

She unveiled a 30-page growth plan aimed at removing barriers to business as part of her speech to the Lib Dem conference in Brighton.

Cooper, who is also the party’s Treasury spokesperson, said too many ideas, start-ups and research started in Britain but ended up being taken overseas.

She also outlined a new Growth and Defence Partnership with the EU to reverse the economic damage of Brexit, that she claimed is currently costing the UK £90bn a year in lost tax revenue.

Speaking on stage in Brighton, she said: “We build brilliant start-ups, and watch too many leave to scale somewhere else. We produce world-class research, and too little of it becomes a British product.”

“Britain has the potential,” she went on. “The system holds it back. The computer says no.

“This plan tears down the barriers to investment, to innovation, and to skills.”

Cooper called for the creation of a digital one-stop-shop service for businesses and investors, combining tax, regulatory, legal, Companies House, and general business services.

Creating this within a new Department for Growth would simplify red tape and help small and medium-sized businesses compete and grow, she said.

Cooper said a new Growth and Defence Partnership with the EU, would be the “single biggest growth lever we could pull” by deepening ties with Europe.

“It could turbo-charge our economy and start to reverse the economic damage of Brexit which is currently costing us £90bn a year in lost tax revenue,” she said.

“In power, we will strike the deal on the single market, we will strike the deal on a customs union, we will strike the deal on defence.”

She claimed the Lib Dems would say “what no other party dares to say” that Britain “belongs at the heart of Europe, and we will take her there.”

Seeking to differentiate the Liberal Democrats from rival parties, she said her party would avoid “more punishing tax hikes from Labour or painful spending cuts by the Conservatives and Reform UK”.

She attacked Chancellor John Healey for his speech earlier this month, which “contained no vision, no ideas, and absolutely no mention of Europe”.

Cooper also attacked Reform and the Conservatives for being “locked in a race to the bottom without a single credible costing between them”.

She highlighted how the new Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith had helped to deliver and defend the Liz Truss mini-budget, which she said “crashed the pound, it spiked your mortgage, it cost the country billions”, and Nigel Farage defended the move.

“But the worst could be yet to come: Farage is modeling himself on Trump,” she said.

“A President who has used the presidency to enrich himself, dismantled anti-corruption safeguards and pardoned crypto criminals.

“We cannot allow that kind of politics to take hold in our country — We cannot afford to allow Nigel Farage to win the keys to No 10 or let the Tories put him there.”