Labour’s KFC-sponsored class war begins

The Labour Party loves a bogeyman: Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu. But at conference this year, the capitalist enemy du jour, ripe for a good socialist bashing, is none other than Britain’s very own social mobility success story, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. The billionaire chemical engineer has incurred the wrath of the comrades after – God forbid – warning that the country is ‘on the slide’ and that wealth creators are fleeing in their droves.

At a conference rally piss-up yesterday evening – sponsored, rather wonderfully, by KFC – pensions minister Torsten Bell whipped the Labour faithful into a class-war frenzy with a tirade against the dastardly billionaire. He told hundreds of conference-goers: ‘I’ll tell you what, under a Labour government, Britain is not on the slide if you’re a low-paid worker with sick pay for the first time in British history from this April. Britain is not on the slide if you are a zero hours contract worker, working on the 25 hours a week and wanting to be guaranteed the hours you do and the rate of the shift you are working on. And Britain is not on the slide when you have got this country growing the fastest in the G7.’

But Bell saved his biggest cheer for a good old-fashioned attack on the rich. He thundered:

We need to remind everyone of that because people will want to talk Britain down and when Sir Jim Radcliffe says Britain’s on the slide I say he’s the last man to be saying that. Because how do you know if you’re a tax exile in Monaco?

Nothing gets a Labour conference crowd going quite like the mention of a rich man. It rather set the tone for the coming days, as delegates prepare to debate how best to rinse the wealthy to fund more benefits and a brand new refugee route for Gaza. Eat the rich – once everyone has finished their complimentary KFC drinks, presumably.

Responding to Bell’s class-war rallying cry, Tory deputy chairman Matt Vickers said: ‘Torsten Bell should spend less time attacking businessmen and more time explaining why the pensioners he is supposed to be looking after are being hit with higher taxes and squeezed living standards. Meanwhile businesses are shutting sites, as Ratcliffe’s has done, or closing altogether thanks to Labour’s tax hikes and sky-high energy prices due to their net zero obsession. If this is the best defence Labour can muster, it says rather more about them than Jim Ratcliffe.’