What business can expect from the new government

Sir Keir Starmer has swept into Downing Street in a landslide Labour election victory, but the party’s honeymoon with business might be short-lived.

Labour not only has inherited deep-seated economic problems after 14 years of Conservative rule, ranging from planning to skills to productivity, but it is also more immediately confronted with a series of industrial crises and business reform minefields that threaten to quickly undermine its relationship with industry.

Labour’s handling of them — including the contentious overseas takeover of Royal Mail and the future of both Thames Water and the Port Talbot steelworks — could quickly come to define the new government’s relations with business, as well as its traditional union backers.

Labour went into the last general election in 2019 with a