Team Ed proposed some modest new rules for business among its small steps away from new Labour.

Ed Miliband’s promised cap on energy prices was one of the few times Labour made big news.

Labour’s stand on payday lenders, raising the minimum wage and Andy Burnham’s call for limits on fat, sugar and salt in kids’ food have all made some impact.

So it seems like an odd time for the Fabians, one of Labour’s oldest think tanks, to rush out a report saying Labour must move away from regulation. But that’s what it did.

The report led to headlines saying Labour needs a “Better relationship with British business” and that it is wary of regulation — and that this message is coming from within the party.

The Fabian report itself — called In It Together — argues Labour’s “togetherness” must embrace corporations.

The Fabians say Ed looks too red. They say: “Labour’s headline policy interventions have been too easy for critics to cast as red in tooth and claw.”

The Fabians say it shouldn’t have to be this way, if only Miliband would see corporations are his pals. Multinationals only want to help.

The Fabians say: “A Labour government is going to need all the help it can get to achieve its social mission and so needs business as an ally, not an enemy.

“Rather than seeing markets as needing regulation to prevent them being socially destructive, the left needs a greater focus on how they can be helped to create social good.”

After reheating some past-its-

sell-by-date Blairite word soup, the report makes some concrete arguments on regulation.

Specifically Labour must “see regulation as a measure of last resort and if regulation is necessary, commit to engaging with the relevant sector and aim to announce it with the endorsement of the companies affected.”

Calling for less regulation is a recipe for slowing down and trimming back Labour’s already limited demands.

How unsurprising then that the whole report was paid for by the Portman Group — a front for the big alcohol firms.

The Portman Group, representing Heineken, Bacardi, Carlsberg and all, was set up to head off stricter rules on booze.

It offers verbal tickings-off to drinks companies over their advertising — but also lobbies hard against actual rules like minimum pricing.

So the whole Fabian report

against Labour regulation was paid for by a corporate interest group dedicated to resisting regulation.

The Portman Group’s involvement in the report was happily ignored by the newspapers, ignoring the basic reporting rule — “follow the money.”

The Fabians have much deeper roots than some of the other think tanks, with regional membership and a genuine grassroots.

But they also have a terrible record for taking money from sleazebags. At the beginning of the new Labour years the Fabians took cash from Enron, a dodgy Republican-linked energy firm that was behind physical attacks on Indian farmers and a conspiracy to manipulate US electricity prices.

This cash dried up when Enron collapsed in one massive criminal pile in 2001.

H&M’s boss getting filthy rich by cheating minimum wage workers

The government recently publicly “named and shamed” firms prosecuted for not paying the minimum wage.

This included big firms like clothes chain H&M, which underpaid 540 staff. So minimum wage cheating isn’t just about small, fringe firms.

In Britain H&M has an £800 million turnover and makes an £18m annual profit. It makes those huge profits on the back of low-paid staff.

H&M said it broke the law because of “errors within some of our stores concerning time logging.”

Cheating retail staff by not paying them for all the hours they work is very common. H&M staff are so low paid that when the firm shaves a bit off their hours they go beneath the minimum wage.

To give an indication of how much H&M makes by exploiting staff the chairman and owner of the firm Stefan Persson is the 23rd-richest man in the world, with a $24 billion fortune, according to Forbes.

He’s so rich that he annoys other millionaires. Persson bought a country estate in Wiltshire with some of the money he makes from H&M.

He’s building a new mansion — a three-storey, nine-bedroom affair with a kitchen wing, swimming pool, orangery and tennis court. The house will have six full-time staff and parking for 12 cars, according to the planning application.

But his neighbour Harry Hyams, a pheasant-hunting property developer with a fortune of only around £300m, is enraged.

Persson’s new “stately home-style” building will knock down a bunch of trees, which Hyams says offer “winter holding cover” for his pheasants. Persson is so rich that his luxuries make other super-rich people angry. And he gets all that money out of the people who make and sell the clothes in his shops.

What Persson and his minimum wage cheating show is that the retail

industry is very rich because the staff are underpaid.

As the TUC says, this is an argument for more minimum wage inspectors. Retail has the second-largest group of minimum wage workers — around 270,000 — but has not been targeted by inspectors. And cheating is common in retail.

In 2013 HMRC announced that a national retailer had been “forced to pay more than £193,000 to 3,500 staff for requiring them to attend work before and after opening hours without pay.” Unpaid work is one common dodge.

HMRC also referred to another — a retailer which “required employees to purchase specific items of clothing from its range” was ordered to repay “almost £170,000 to more than 6,000 workers.”

Clothes and shoe shops regularly force staff to buy their clothes, rather than supply them free — it’s good advertising. But where staff pay is already near the minimum wage, this practice becomes illegal.

What this all demonstrates is the urgent need to increase unionisation in retail.

Inspectors will never find or deal with all the instances of widespread cheating of shop staff — but unions could win these battles without even striking.

They could probably also win harder battles as well, such as pushing pay above minimum rates, because shops are very vulnerable to quite short strike action. New inspectors would be great. But a union drive in retail would be a lot better.