Our country is facing many problems. A stagnant economy. Runaway illegal and legal immigration. An insatiable public sector that swallows up more and more taxpayers’ money every year for less. Any sensible Prime Minister with a massive majority would set about trying to tackle these issues. Instead, Keir Starmer seems determined to make them worse.

Since taking office, he has picked battles with British businesses that were last fought in the 1970s and taken a wrecking ball to UK economy. Unsurprisingly, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Last week we saw over a million more people on benefits and unemployment up for the tenth month in a row on Starmer’s watch. This came hot after we found out Rachel Reeves has torn a £50 billion black hole in the public finances. Business leaders, both publicly and privately, are sounding the alarm, but Labour isn’t listening.

Unemployment going through the roof is not just a statistic, it is a national scandal. Each job lost is a person not able to make ends meet, a career down the drain or yet another person on the dole. Britain is more than just a nation of shopkeepers. We are entrepreneurs, risk takers and go getters. Yet under Labour, it is getting harder for the grafters to get ahead, while the grifters collect handouts left, right, and centre.

After only one year, it is increasingly obvious that Labour is not interested in helping people help themselves. They are fixated on Left-wing vanity projects, like the nationalised energy company that won’t produce any energy, and taxing the living daylights out the country.

Unlike this Labour government, my own background is in business. Also, unlike Labour ministers, I spend a lot of time listening to real businesses around the country. Their number one ask is for a ceasefire in this war on private enterprise, and for the Chancellor to now rule out further tax raids – something she was happy to do once but is now suspiciously loath to repeat.

Because if you thought the last painful budget was the last of it, you have another thing coming. Rachel Reeves is all set to jack up your taxes once again, the question now being when rather than if. They are also all dreading the looming Employment Bill, which should be renamed the unemployment Bill. It is set to drag Britain back to a time when the unions were able to hold the country to ransom.

Already, we are seeing an exodus of those who want to get on and get up and don’t want to live their lives weaned to the state. We are witnessing quite possibly the largest ‘brain drain’ in British history. In 12 long months of Starmer’s Britain, 4,000 company directors have upped sticks. It is estimated a further 16,000 millionaires are set to leave this year – Keir Starmer beating even communist China to the top spot of this unenviable league this year.

These are people who pay for our public services with their tax contributions, boost our economy and fund family businesses. Without these people contributing to our country, Britain will be less great. Labour’s war on business shows no signs of slowing down, so they are getting out while they still can.

Sadly, those who will pay the price of Labour’s economic vandalism are the hard-working families left paying more tax to cover those who’ve left; ‘generation jobless’ – the young people struggling to get their first job after school or college; and our decaying high streets.

If their first miserable year was anything to go by, who knows how much damage they will cause in four years? The next Conservative government will reverse this decline and take a chainsaw to many of Labour’s most punishing policies. That day can’t come soon enough.