Osborne: Labour and Ukip policies ‘anti-business’

Chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne accused the Labour Party and Ukip of seeking to isolate Britain and risking its recovery.

Speaking the day before European elections expected to show his Conservatives lingering in third place behind Ed Miliband’s Labour and Nigel Farage’s Ukip, he told business leaders support for the left and populist right threatens to damage Britain’s standing as a free-trading, free market economy for the first time in 25 years.

“Political parties on the left and the populist right have this in common: They want to pull up the drawbridge and shut Britain off from the world,” Osborne told the Confederation of British Industry.

“We now see a deeply pessimistic, depressing, anti-business agenda.”

While Ukip advocates withdrawing from the EU, Labour has attacked the Tories as ignoring the cost of living, promising energy-price freezes, and further taxes on bank bonuses and high earners.

The policies advocated by Labour and Ukip will put Britain on a path of “relative economic decline”, and lead to price increases due to a lack of investment in the energy industry, as well as job losses as companies take their business elsewhere, according to Osborne.

“For all of my adult life, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the year I left school, there has been a political consensus in this country that Britain’s future lies as an open, market economy,” he said.

“That consensus that we put the national economic interest first, ahead of opportunist party advantage, is under threat for the first time in 25 years.”

Osborne continued: “Anyone who cares about our long-term economic prosperity should get behind our plan to seek fundamental reform of the EU and of Britain’s relationship with the EU.

“For those who say that a referendum creates uncertainty, I say, a referendum is the only way to resolve the uncertainty that already hangs over Britain’s relationship with Europe.”

While acknowledging that optimism in Britain is growing, he reiterated his commitment to austerity. “Our task to secure our country’s economic future is not even half done. This is a decade-long turn-around job we have embarked on, and we are determined to see it through.”