Tories hail business backing for NI plan

David Cameron flew to a Bolton bakery on Wednesday to publicise a growing tide of business support for Tory plans to reverse part of Labour’s planned national insurance increase.

The Conservative leader jetted to the north-west straight after a verbal duel with Gordon Brown over the tax cut at the final pre-election prime minister’s questions. He visited Warburtons, a family bakery, whose director Richard Warburton is one of dozens of business leaders to endorse the Conservative plans.

Heralding the decision on Wednesday by another 30 business leaders to back the £5.6bn Tory plan, Mr Cameron stated: “The momentum is building against Gordon Brown’s job tax.” He forecast that national insurance would be a “key issue” in the campaign for the May 6 election.

The Tory focus on the tax cut reflects the party’s belief that the pledge is serving a double purpose: both wooing business and resonating with voters.

The prime minister and chancellor are on Thursday expected to argue that the Tory plan would damage business interests because the efficiency savings used to fund it would withdraw money from the economy when the recovery is still fragile.

Labour insisted that its apparent loss of business support was a result of the way the issue had been framed, rather than a wider vote of confidence in the Tories. “If you ask business leaders if they want a tax cut, they’re all going to say yes. If you also ask, do you think we should continue to support the economy this year, they all say yes,” a party official said.

But Labour appeared to be struggling to muster big names to counter the business support for the Tory plan.

Tesco, Britain’s largest private sector employer, responded to a report that it had “snubbed” the Tory campaign by stressing it remained apolitical. But it said it had “often expressed our concern about the burden of tax and regulation and its impact on the long-term health of the economy” – a statement implicitly backing the opposition party’s argument.

Asked by the BBC on Wednesday to name a senior business leader who backed the rival Labour proposal, Lord Adonis, the transport minister, could only come up with Lord Sugar, the Labour minister.

In contrast, the 68 business leaders who have now thrown their weight behind the Tory plans form an impressive roster of chairmen and chief executives of some of Britain’s biggest businesses.

They include three members of Mr Brown’s business council – Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks and Spencer, Paul Walsh, chief executive of Diageo, and Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com.

The only comfort for Labour is that most executives have concentrated their fire on the national insurance issue. But the protest underscores a broader discontent with the government over tax and regulation that has grown in recent months.

The 30 names announced on Wednesday – on top of 38 who have declared their view – come from a broad range of businesses, underlining how widely corporate leaders have united in opposition to Labour’s planned increase in national insurance.

Many of the names are from service industries – 10 from retailing alone – but others range from oil exploration to airlines, pubs and publishing. The list includes entrepreneurs and inward investors as well as heads of publicly owned and private equity-owned companies.

The list includes three FTSE 100 figures – Anthony Habgood, chairman of Reed Elsevier, Sir John Egan, chairman of Severn Trent, and Rick Medlock, finance chief of Inmarsat – on top of the 11 who have already signed up to the protest.