Philip Hammond has criticised Labour’s announcement that Lord Alan Sugar will lead a new government task force designed to fight the corner of small businesses against the banks.

“Only Labour could announce on April Fool’s day that it had appointed the man who called credit-starved small businesses ‘moaners’ who lived in ‘Disney World’ to be the adjudicator on their applications for bank loans”, he said.

Lord Mandelson has selected Lord Sugar to sit on the task force which will set up the Small Business Credit Adjudicator. Lord Mandelson believes the people he has chosen “… understand the critical importance of new finance and credit flow to the growth of small, innovative companies”.

But Lord Sugar said last year: “The moaners are bust… they don’t need the bank, they need an insolvency practitioner”.

This comes on the same day that the Federation of Small Businesses, the British Retail Consortium and 23 business leaders attacked Labour’s planned tax on jobs.

“No wonder no-one believes Lord Mandelson’s claims to be the champion of small business when Labour would rather tax jobs and the recovery than cut government waste”, Hammond added.

Well this is news that small business can do without. Clearly Lord Alan Sugar has nothing in common with small business and is merely another puppet of Labour.

Jim Ferguson