John Longworth, chair of the Independent Business Network (IBN), has issued a stark warning that Britain faces "national suicide" unless the right-wing parties unite, while branding Andy Burnham a "snake oil salesman".
Writing for the Daily Express, Longworth said the political landscape is "on a knife edge", with opinion polls reflecting "violent swings among the electorate". He argued that people are searching for a political platform and for politicians "capable and sufficiently determined to deliver it".
Economic growth as the key test
Longworth, a former MEP and entrepreneur, said he assesses policy "against economic growth", insisting "nothing else matters if we don't have economic growth in the first instance". He noted that Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives "now seem to have grasped it".
He criticised the Green Party's policies as "communist lunacy" that would drive Britain towards "a third-world style banana republic of poverty", and dismissed the Liberal Democrats as "irrelevant, illiberal anti-democrats" whose leader would be viewed as "aliens from another planet" by Palmerston and Gladstone.
Labour and the electoral system
The Labour Party, he said, has "descended into a quasi-Marxist throwback to the 1970's", a period he described as "Trade Union-dominated, debt-ridden and inflation-led". He accused Mr Burnham of planning to "gerrymander the electoral system" through proportional representation, which he claimed would "disenfranchise the electorate" and replace democracy with "post-electoral dirty deals between parties".
Longworth warned that if another left-wing government comes to power, "Britain will be finished as an independent nation", and blamed Reform, the Conservatives and Mr Lowe for the current split on the right, saying they are "in real danger of consuming each other in an insane smorgasbord of personal antipathy and tribal rivalry".
Call for a decisive arrangement
He argued that "one of these right-thinking parties must prevail decisively above all others", and if that seems unlikely before the next general election, "an arrangement must be struck with good heart and generosity of spirit or, at least, hard-headed calculation and determination".
Longworth concluded: "Anything less will be truly unforgivable and a matter of national suicide. It isn't a game."
