Former Trade Minister Lord Jones of Birmingham has accused Labour leader Ed Miliband of waging “war” against business.
The peer, a former head of the CBI, hit out at Labour as he spoke to activists at the Conservative conference in Manchester.
Lord Jones was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government with responsibility for promoting British business across the world, although he was not a member of any political party.
He currently has a number of roles including chairman of Triumph Motorcycles Limited, Britain’s largest UK motorcycle manufacturer.
The Birmingham-born peer, who practised law in the city for 20 years, hit out after Labour announced a series of policy proposals at its own conference in Brighton a week previously, including reversing a planned cut in corporation tax, forcing energy companies to freeze prices and seizing land from developers which failed to build on it.
Lord Jones said: “At the moment there is quite a war going on against business.
"I think we saw last week at the Labour conference an enormous hate of wealth creation in business which just terrifies me, it really does.
"I have never belonged to a political party. I’m the only minister the country ever had that never belonged to the party of government.
“So I don’t say this with any party political stance at all – I’m a crossbench peer.
“But I just worry when you’re seeing this immense hatred of wealth creation in the nation.”
He condemned “this party political crime of finding business for some reason wrong, evil.” The nation needed industry in order to create jobs and fund public services, he said. When business makes money, it can only do one of three things.
“It can reward the shareholders... and they‘ll pay tax on it. Or you can keep it in the business as retained profit, and you’ll pay tax on it. Or you can employ people and pay them, bonuses and all, and they’ll pay tax on it.
“And that tax goes in part to pay for good, decent hard-working people in the public sector.
“The ones we need for sure – doctors, nurses, teachers prison officers, police and so on, and they pay tax on it.”
Speaking to a fringe event organised by the Centre for Cities think tank, Lord Jones warned that Britain need to improve its education standards if it hoped to succeed.
“Twenty per cent of the adults in this nation cannot read to the standard expected of an 11-year-old.
“And before people say oh well that’s what you get from immigration, the average adult illiterate is white, male and 26 years old.
“Thirty-three per cent of the adults in this nation cannot add up two three-figure numbers. A third of adults are functionally innumerate.
“And we want to step up to the plate and win in a globalised competitive market? If it wasn’t so serious it would make me laugh.
“We have to deal with that absolutely rudimentary fact, which is that a value-added limited skilled base to create wealth jobs, public sector through the taxation that wealth creates.
“If we do not provide our of school people with the basic skills, we are finished.”
He added: “Wouldn’t it be great for cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle, to be able to say, we are the first city in Britain with an adult literacy rate of over 90 per cent?”
