What do you think about when you picture a British female entrepreneur? Is it Trinny Woodall launching Trinny London after a long TV career or Deborah Meaden from Dragons’ Den? Maybe it’s Anita Roddick who launched The Body Shop in the Seventies. Chances are, beyond these examples, you may struggle to name a female entrepreneur, and you most certainly won’t know that they could be worth over £50bn to the British economy right now.
For Starmer and Reeves, growth, how to get it, how to stimulate it and how to reap the rewards of it has been a single focus. Get that right and the rest follows. More employment means more tax receipts and more tax receipts mean more money to deliver better services. Or so goes the argument. Various economic interventions have spluttered with a series of false starts, U-turns and dead ends, with UK growth remaining sluggish.
