Brexit was the elephant in the room at the Labour Business Conference

“Let’s imagine that you were invited to an event like this, a Labour business conference, before any of the changes to our party had taken place. The question is - would you go?”

Laughter echoed around the room. Back in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader, Starmer the Shadow Brexit Secretary and the party had a far more frosty attitude towards business. When then Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell attended Davos to tell the “elite” they were held “in contempt”, this year Rachel Reeves met with a number of crypto-firms.

Starmer told the packed hall, with leaders from AstraZeneca, Uber and HBSC cramming in, that he wanted to have business’ “fingerprint on every one of our five missions”. Even Angela Rayner told the crowd she prefers hanging with execs in suits than MPs down in Westminster.

Reeves announced a number of business friendly measures including capping corporation tax at 25%, keeping full expensing and the annual investment allowance. However one word, that has been on the lips of many businesses for months, was almost entirely absent - Brexit. 

The Shadow Chancellor mentioned it once, swiftly saying that “Brexit without a plan” was “piling burdens onto businesses”. However Starmer did not say the B-word at all, and has made his new opinion on this very clear: “There’s no case for rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union.”

But if you talk to many SMEs, one of the most pro-business things any government could do is consider rejoining the single market. Just yesterday, new import checks have started on animal and plant goods coming into the UK, which will be ramped up throughout the year.

Paolo Arrigo, managing director of Seeds of Italy, an importers based in Harrow, north-west London, told me that businesses will close. “The hope we've got is that in the next election, some grown ups are elected and they are pro European and pro small business and anti bureaucracy,” he said. 

“We need a change of direction, we need a change of government. We need someone who's not anti-European. How long can we all continue with higher costs and lower profits and longer waiting times and less choice? It's too much.”

It doesn’t look like Starmer’s Labour will cater to him. Jo Foster runs two small businesses in Rishi Sunak’s constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire, where four historic local traders closed in one week due to Brexit.

“My biggest single thing is - we can’t pretend it never happened and unless you admit where you’re at you’re not going to get better,” Jo told me. “I hope we’re not going to get the same stuff from Starmer, he’s got stuff to answer for on Brexit as well.

“Even before we were in general election territory, Labour missed so many chances to call the Tories out on Brexit. Is that behaviour embedded in the Labour party, or are they going to suddenly reveal what they really think?”

Wiltshire farmer Liz Webster, who runs the Save British Farming group, says the best thing for the UK’s agriculture and food security is a return to the single market. “Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are not looking after British interests by not dealing with this Brexit car crash,” she told me. “The most nationalistic thing you can think about is your food.  relying too much on imported food is not good for us.”

Almost 60% of British export businesses have found no positive effect from post-Brexit trade deals, the government’s own research has found, and even this week Andrea Leadsom actually admitted that trade “friction” and red tape was the “price you pay” for “being a sovereign state again”. I didn’t see that on the side of a bus?

It could have been that in the warren of rooms at the historic Oval cricket ground, where the Labour Business Conference was held, Shadow Cabinet members were having private conversations with CEOs and MDs about Brexit and the single market. However Starmer has come out so strongly against it, it’s hard to imagine any flexibility. 

Starmer can talk about growth all he wants, but unless he considers Brexit there will always be a dead weight dragging down the UK economy. 

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.