KEMI BADENOCH: Of course the captains of industry and wealth creators are quitting Britain when Labour treats them as cows to be milked

Labour has made it very clear to wealthy people that they are not welcome in the UK. 

Whether it’s threats of a ‘mansion tax’, or an exit tax if they dare leave the country, there can be no doubt: under Andy Burnham, Britain is becoming a hostile environment for the very people we need to create jobs and prosperity. 

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the founder of the hugely successful petrochemical firm Ineos and Manchester United’s co-owner, said on Saturday that he had lost confidence in Britain. 

The UK’s biggest taxpayer, betting billionaire Fred Done, joined Sir Jim by saying he would leave these shores if he wasn’t so old and has ‘never felt so gloomy’ about the outlook for the UK since he opened his first bookies in Salford in 1967. 

Done and Sir Jim are not just names on a rich list – they are serious contributors to our economy. The latter was once handing the Exchequer more than £100million a year. 

Responding to Sir Jim, Labour’s pensions minister Torsten Bell – a public-sector man through and through – had the audacity to say he was not a patriot. It was a crass response that revealed more of Bell’s own inadequacies before a hugely successful entrepreneur than anything I could write here. 

The question inept Labour ministers such as him should be asking themselves is: who replaces the tax paid by these captains of industry when they leave? 

Labour can dislike billionaires as much as it likes. But when a man paying £330million a year in tax leaves Britain – as happened when hedge fund boss Chris Rokos moved his tax residency to Greece this month – the Treasury doesn’t stop needing £330million. 

Chris Rokos moved his tax residency to Greece this month 

The answer is that the money will, of course, come from the rest of us. That is why Labour is now floating ‘wealth’ taxes and ‘mansion’ taxes that are going for middle-class families and their family homes. 

Only days ago, Andy Burnham gathered entrepreneurs in Downing Street and promised that his government would be a ‘partner for growth’. The sort of nice words we’ve come to expect from our Prime Minister as he is, after all, a people-pleaser. 

He tells everyone whatever they want to hear, but his actions speak louder than his words. And the wealthy voting with their feet to leave Britain speaks volumes of a country that no longer welcomes investment and job creation but treats business and entrepreneurs as cows to be milked. 

Of course, it is not just tax receipts they take with them, but jobs too. Government can’t redistribute prosperity that has not been created. It won’t be in Britain that the next generation of firms will build itself from start-ups to small- and medium-sized businesses and beyond. It will be another country, less hostile to enterprise, that will benefit from the jobs that process will bring. 

Here, the teenagers and graduates searching for work, the apprentices desperate for a start, and the risk-takers dreaming of turning their passion into a business will all lose out. 

Britain has almost a million young people not in education, employment or training. Ministers try to blame Conservative school reforms that shot our pupils up international league tables, when the reality is that it was Labour’s reckless tax rises and red tape that fed this dire situation. 

The fundamental problem is that this current crop of Labour politicians isn’t tough enough to make difficult decisions. 

Whether it’s refusing to cut welfare and instead offering ’employment support’, or Burnham saying ‘national security cannot come at the expense of social security’, the Prime Minister’s entire political proposition is that difficult choices can be avoided. 

Sir Jim Ratcliffe said on Saturday that he had lost confidence in Britain

Fred Done said he would leave these shores if he wasn’t so old and has ‘never felt so gloomy’ about the outlook for the UK since he opened his first bookies in Salford in 1967

They cannot. Just look at the decisions on oil and gas. Sir Jim criticised Britain importing energy unnecessarily, attacked North Sea taxation and raised concerns about gas storage. He called our failure to exploit our own resources ‘insanity’.

He is being polite. The Government’s bovine response, that it remained ‘confident’ about supply, shows how clueless they are of a crisis waiting to happen.

Saudi Arabia’s East-West oil pipeline, which bypassed the troublesome Strait of Hormuz, has been badly damaged by drone attacks. Houthi bandits threaten shipping routes into the Red Sea. British families and businesses can see perfectly well that another shock is coming to their energy bills.

Yet our Prime Minister and his Cabinet are behaving like a flock of ostriches, heads buried so deep in the sand they could strike oil themselves.

British industry is currently crushed by some of the highest electricity bills anywhere in the world.

We have oil and gas fields in the North Sea waiting to be approved that could bring down those costs. And yet, despite being signed off under the Conservatives, Sir Keir Starmer and now Burnham have dithered for more than two years. 

The Conservative answer is straightforward. We must end Labour’s ban on new oil and gas licences, maximise North Sea extraction and scrap the Energy Profits Levy. 

The Jackdaw and Rosebank fields are ready to drill, and workers are primed, yet Burnham appears more worried about a by-election in north London than he does in bringing down bills. 

I have my views on why Labour keeps getting things wrong. My Shadow Chancellor, Andrew Griffith, has more private-sector experience than the whole Labour frontbench combined. Andrew spent decades in business, including as a FTSE100 finance director, and has actually made the sorts of decisions that Labour ministers are too scared to contemplate. 

Conservatives always have to clean up the huge mess that Labour leaves behind. That’s why my economic team is devising policies that will revitalise business in the UK, create jobs and hopefully convince the wealth drivers and entrepreneurs that Britain is still worth investing in. 

We are asking the questions that need to be asked. How do we make Britain richer? How do we persuade somebody to build their company here rather than in America or China? How do we convince investors to choose Britain over Paris, Dubai or New York? 

At the same time, Burnham is gazing out of the window of No 10 ‘North’, longing for the pre-Thatcher economic era, when the state owned much of the economy and the public suffered through rolling blackouts, uncollected bins and even gravedigger strikes. 

When Labour reaches for the taxpayer’s credit card one more time and discovers it has been declined, it will look around and ask where all the money went. 

The uncomfortable answer will be staring the party in the face – the Government drove it away.