Backing Business to Create Economic Growth

Andrew Rosindell Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Reform)]

At the heart of the King’s Speech lies a fundamental misunderstanding of how economic growth is created. Growth comes from the grassroots, not central planning. It certainly does not come from Whitehall or European micromanagement and regulation; rather, it comes from everyday people in our constituencies who get up early, work hard and build businesses from nothing while incurring risks themselves. It comes from Governments getting out of the way of people’s lives and allowing enterprise to flourish.

In Romford, the entrepreneurial spirit is deeply ingrained in our community. Ever since King Henry III granted our market charter in 1247, our town has thrived through enterprise. My constituency has always been a town of market traders, small businessmen, shopkeepers and the self-employed. Napoleon’s remark that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers should fill us with pride, as our entrepreneurial spirit is the foundation of Britain’s success as a prosperous, free-trading nation.

Yet today my local high street, like so many up and down the country, tells a very different story. Successive Governments, and this Government in particular, have made it harder, not easier, to operate a successful business here in Britain. Only this Government could stand here claiming to back growth while simultaneously hammering employers with a tax on employment through higher national insurance contributions. The people of Romford made their views known very clearly on 7 May, with every single council seat in my constituency—all 23—being won by Reform UK. Ordinary working men and women have simply had enough. Watching their communities fall into terminal decline while the national Government effectively destroy people’s livelihoods is simply unacceptable.

Two of those Reform UK councillors, Diane and Russell Smith, are landlords of the Wheatsheaf pub—a family-run business started by Russell’s father. They are risk takers, and they are indispensable to our local economy. It was never their intention to enter frontline politics, but they could no longer tolerate watching their community fall into disrepair and seeing the so-called Government of working people fleece small business owners and local traders like them and make running a successful commercial enterprise intolerable. They are right.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Member is right that the pubs, clubs, small shops and associations—the things that Edmund Burke called the “little platoons”—are what constitute civil society. Yet successive Governments, including this one, have capitulated to huge, corporate, multinational, globalist businesses. Nothing in the King’s Speech casts us in a separate, distinctive direction, and the hon. Member is right to champion those little platoons in a Burkean fashion.

[Andrew Rosindell]

The right Member is, as always, completely correct. Our nation’s success is built on grassroots entrepreneurial spirit, not bureaucracy, corporate control or Government regulation—and certainly not Brussels interfering with our affairs yet again, after we had a referendum in which the British people voted overwhelmingly to get out of a political union with Europe. Now, the Government want us to have a pathway to growth, apparently through closer alignment with the European Union. We do not yet know what the contents of the so-called European partnership Bill will be, but it is bound to mean more powers being stripped away from this place and the British people, with the introduction of so-called dynamic alignment—the regulatory straitjacket that will be imposed on us by Brussels. As the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) said to the Prime Minister only last week, the Labour party’s solution to growth is to make the UK a subservient rule taker from a foreign Parliament. That is unacceptable. The socialist solution is always more central planning, more spending and more bureaucracy. It failed in the 1970s, and it will fail again today.

What this country needs is not more Whitehall diktats or Government intrusion into people’s lives, but another 1979-style Margaret Thatcher revolution for enterprise—a period of national rejuvenation defined by cutting back state intervention and giving people back control over their lives. We must cut the waste and red tape strangling business, scrap IR35, and give our tradesmen, freelancers and small firms a fair deal again. We need to lower and simplify corporation tax to make Britain one of the best places in the world to build a business, instead of watching as the wealthy flee our shores.

We must abolish inheritance tax, so that families can pass on what they have built through a lifetime of work. We must reform welfare, so that those who can work do work, but ensure that those who are vulnerable are genuinely cared for. We must reward effort, protect the vulnerable and, most importantly, bring back respect for the hard-working taxpayer. We need to cut waste, restore discipline to public finances, and spend where it helps working people and small businesses, rather than propping up the bureaucracy and needless white-collar workers. I want Romford to thrive again, but we can achieve that only if we stop treating small businesses like cash machines, and start treating them, rightly, as the backbone of our economy and the lifeblood of our communities.