CP
Britain, once the cradle of industrial daring and entrepreneurial flair, is being frog-marched back into the bureaucratic swamp.
The Labour Government’s so-called Employment Rights Bill has been dreamed up by a front bench, not one of whom has ever run a business or had to make a payroll. It is the most ruinous piece of business legislation in decades.
It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: a “reform” that pretends to help workers but will, in truth, throttle the very businesses that employ them.
Under this bill, employees will gain protection from unfair dismissal from day one on the job, no questions asked, no time to prove competence, no probationary safety net. It sounds noble, doesn’t it? A triumph for the little guy! In reality, it’s a death knell for risk-taking and job creation.
The Death of Dynamism
Imagine you’re a small business owner – a café, a tech start-up, a local builder – taking on your first employee. You’re already battling energy costs, red tape, tax hikes, and the creeping shadow of government interference. Now, Labour wants to add another boulder to your rucksack: hire someone, and from day one, you can’t dismiss them without facing legal peril.
Who in their right mind would take that risk?
Every hiring decision will become a potential legal minefield. Businesses will hire less, grow slower, and be forced to keep disruptors or underperformers out of fear of being sued. The result? Fewer opportunities for precisely the kind of people Labour claims to champion.
Even the Resolution Foundation, a think tank closely allied with Labour, has sounded the alarm. They warned that this policy “risks blighting the job prospects of millions while offering little obvious gain to workers.” Their words, not those of some free-market zealot, but of Labour’s own intellectual stable.
The Blind Leading the Blind
One can’t help but marvel at the economic illiteracy of it all. Not a single one of Labour’s frontbenchers has ever run a business, met a payroll, or lain awake worrying about VAT bills or staff sick leave. They legislate in theory, not in reality. It’s the blind leading the blind, ideologues in committee rooms who believe enterprise is some magical tap that gushes jobs and profits, regardless of the laws strangling it.
They simply don’t understand that enterprise is a fragile ecosystem, not a state-mandated right. It thrives on trust, flexibility, and freedom. Labour’s plan will smother that spirit beneath a duvet of union comfort and legalese.
A Nation of Employees, Not Employers
One begins to wonder whether this is deliberate. Does Labour even want a nation of entrepreneurs anymore? Or would they prefer everyone to work for the state, safe, docile, and dependent?
This bill reeks of a deeper instinct: a suspicion… no, a disdain… for those who build, innovate, and risk. For the small business owner who remortgages their house to start a company. For the employer who creates jobs in the first place. To Labour, such people are not heroes but “exploiters,” to be corralled and monitored like errant livestock.
The Conservatives Are Right to Fight
The Conservatives, to their credit, have drawn a line. They’ve urged peers in the Lords to back a six-month threshold for unfair dismissal protection, a sensible, internationally normal compromise supported even by the Resolution Foundation.
Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith put it bluntly: at a time of “rising unemployment and anaemic growth,” Britain needs strength, not weakness. He’s right. The economy doesn’t need more lawyers and bureaucrats; it needs more builders, dreamers, and doers.
Remember: roughly 70 percent of the tax that keeps Britain moving comes from the little guys — the SMEs, the small firms and family businesses, the corner shops and the start-ups. That’s the cash that fixes our roads, staffs our schools and keeps the lights on. Kill the entrepreneur and you don’t just harm livelihoods, you kill a country.
A Future Without Fear
If Labour gets its way, Britain risks becoming a country where entrepreneurs hesitate before hiring, innovators think twice before starting, and young workers find fewer doors open. It’s a policy designed by those who’ve never created a job, for those who’ve never risked losing one.
Britain doesn’t need “day one rights.” It needs day one opportunity. It needs less fear of failure, not more.
And if Labour can’t see that, then the next government must repeal this dangerous folly on day one before it snuffs out the last embers of enterprise in this country.
Because when no one dares to start a business, there will be no workers left to “protect.”
This article (Labour’s Employment Rights Bill: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing That Will Devour Enterprise) was created and published by Conservative Post and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author CP
Featured image: The Telegraph
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