Shadow business secretary tells conference fringe event: Labour wants to help people get rich – as long as they pay their taxes

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Labour is not an "anti-wealth party" but aspirational and in favour of millionaires, a shadow cabinet minister has said.

Chuka Umunna, the party's business spokesman, said Labour wants to help people become wealthy as he spoke at its annual conference in Brighton.

During a fringe event, he echoed the claim of Lord Mandelson in the Blair era that Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes".

"I want to send a very strong message here," Umunna said. "We are not an anti-wealth party … We want you to go and make your first million. We want you to do that because if you do that, you're going to provide growth and jobs and opportunities as well as succeeding yourself. I want people to meet their aspirations. We are an aspirational party.

"All we say is that those who have the broadest shoulders bear the heaviest burden."

The sons of bus drivers should aspire to one day own the company their fathers worked for, he added.

As he set out his philosophy about wealth, Umunna also launched a fierce defence of Labour's economic record in government compared with the fall in living standards seen under the coalition.

He said Ed Miliband's team must challenge the "patent nonsense" that Labour crashed the economy.

"There's no running away from it," he said. "The argument is going to start around Labour crashed the car. That is nonsense, patent nonsense. I don't deny there was a global financial crisis, I don't deny we could have better regulated the banks. But we left this country in a far better state in 2010 than we found it in 1997."

He said Labour has better ways of spending not "much more" than £715bn of public money a year than the Tories.

The shadow minister also launched a blistering attack on the "anachronistic" and "yah-boo" way that politics is conducted like a "bloodsport".

He called for an end to the "Punch and Judy" style of debate in the House of Commons, claiming Miliband agrees that prime minister's question time is "absurd".